Positive Realizations

Just Another (another) Substack Debate About PanExperientialism?

I made this its own post because it was too long to put as a comment or re-stack and I think substantive enough to warrant real attention. Some themes include the relationship between logic and feeling, dualisms/monism, morality, capitalism, machine consciousness, computationalism, etc…

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9 days ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Faze Point

In his reply to my post last week about Pope Leo’s AI encyclical, defends an explicitly panexperientialist form of computational functionalism. I applaud his willingness to follow the equation of mental concepts and percepts with their physical effects/behavioral consequences beyond epistemology all the way to its (onto)logical conclusion. Every process partakes in experience. Every function feels. Without the experience of “subject-superjects” (see Whitehead’s Process and Reality, or keyword search my posts!), there is nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.

But affirming that everything is experience is not to smear consciousness indiscriminately across the universe. Faze seems to want to dissolve all distinctions into identities, easy equations between categories he mistakenly assumes I want to dissociate. Distinctions for the purpose of clear analysis and appropriate axiological judgment are not the same as ontological dissociations. The highly repetitive feelings vibrating through electromagnetic societies run along a continuum with but are not simply the same as the reasons and emotions organizing human societies.

Faze invokes process-relational axio-ontology (“we are what we do, we do what feels good”), but his argument feels more like a chain of static identities. Process philosophy is a metaphysics of non-identity. Creativity means many become one and increase by one. That increase means novel contrasts, new propositions, more intensely valuing occasions of experience are possible. There is no necessity in nature that determines intensification of value, though there may be a lucky lure. “Chance,” as it’s called, is where the angels (the Whiteheadian God’s “initial aims”) can slip into the quantum foam at the spaceless base of spacetime to dance the world toward better becomings. Law is not the foundation of nature, for nature is a groundless fountain.

And the fountain naturally forms itself into drops. Drops of experience that develop, envelope themselves, inherit and innovate into evermore complex shapes of consciousness, morphologies of mind that include but transcend their sociohistorical environments. The drops remain always part of the ocean, yes. They are indissociable. They are not separate from but interpenetrate one another. And yet life is a bid for freedom. No two occasions are the same. The ocean is recapitulated within each drop. All experience is valuable, but some experiences achieve more intense contrasts and realize higher harmonies. Nature expresses itself in a nested series of societies (regimes of statistical order, in Whitehead’s sense) whose chaotic edges are continual sources of heterogeneity and variation. Nature evolves evermore elaborate shelters for the electromagnetic feelings that pervade it, some—like cells and cortexes—housing drops of experience that kindle the germ of attention to achieve various grades of consciousness, up to and including the imaginative freedom of human souls.

Everything experiences, but not all experience is the same. Faze’s monism is closer to a Parmenidean/Spinozist identity than to Whitehead’s pluralism of graded achievements. But the moment Faze reintroduces a metric into his flat continuum of feeling by affirming the high grade experience and even consciousness of LLMs relative to rocks, he concedes my point that grades require making qualitative distinctions. He prefers a different criterion, of course: informational complexity; whereas I affirmed metabolic auto-sympoiesis. My claim is that the sort of consciousness sheltered by concrete embodiment is a difference that makes a difference that is not reducible to abstract, substate-neutral information. I am not conjuring the claim from scratch, obviously. I have been quite explicit about my debt to Whitehead, and also Schelling, Hegel, Bergson, Ruyer, Merleau-Ponty, etc. Philosophically justifying the claim that machines are not minds, and minds not machines, in the form of an irrefutable logical argument that would force all readers to agree with me is not something I hold out hope for. But I am over 10k words into a chapter for the Divinity School’s New Science anthology that will at least begin to sketch out what such a justification would look like. Stay tuned.

For now I want to return to Max Scheler’s concept of value-ception, since it is here that I feel Faze and I really diverge. Faze wants to identify Wertnehmung with inference: evaluative feelings are just a function of accumulated expectation from past experience. The moral virtues of the heart are merely adaptively tuned predictions. But this is a genetic argument pretending to be a constitutive one. That our organs of value-perception evolved no more reduces values to statistical vectors than the evolution of vision reduces colors to guesses about wavelengths. Scheler’s claim is that the feeling of value is a distinct intentional act that discloses something real and objective, an ordo amoris, a weighing of worth given with the same perceptual immediacy as the red of the rose (prior to any reflection about photon wavelengths and neural networks). To feel the preciousness and unique value of each human being, or the foulness of their exploitation, is not to run a successful prediction but to see truly.

I do not accept the diagnosis Faze gently applies to me—that my refusal of capitalist enclosure is just a resentful reaction stemming from my wounded pride. He is running Nietzsche’s old move by trying to unmask my moral indignation as ressentiment, my impotent desire for revenge against the successful. I believe it to be based on a lie rooted in an injustice (see my work thinking with Rudolf Steiner’s social threefolding), but I feel no hate for “capitalism.” I feel no hate for capitalists, either. Hatred often hurts the hater more than the hated. But I do feel the suffering of the immiserated millions exploited by this political economy, and I refuse to tow its ideological lines. I am a privileged middle-class professor and am not emotionally lashing out because of some personal slight by “the system.” The scary truth is there is no System, only an open-ended sociohistorical process that no one fully understands or fully controls. I do what I can to feel its contours and steer my words and actions so as to do less harm and bring more lucidity into being. That desire is precisely what leads me to say that the projection of personhood onto LLMs is peak commodity fetishism (h/t for connecting that dot in a WhatsApp thread earlier today!).

Scheler took Nietzsche seriously. Ressentiment, on which Scheler wrote an entire book, is real and has indeed corrupted many on the right and left alike. Yet genuine moral perception is precisely not the product of ressentiment. Ressentiment is defined by impotence. What I am calling for is resistance, the affirmation of a value—in this case, the dignity of human souls—against its violation. That is the opposite of ressentiment. If there’s a moral posture here that is worth being wary of, it’s the one that finds the products of exploited labor beautiful. I refuse to anesthetize my conscience to what I perceive to be unjust.

To grant the proprietary weights of a corporate product the standing of a conscious rights-bearing person is not the liberation of the machine. It is the magical transubstantiation of commodity into subjectivity; and simultaneously the reduction of subjectivity into commodity. The irony is it first took the fiction of corporate personhood to produce the fiction of machine persons. In such a dystopian universe, all persons whether human or machine become digital slaves. If a soul is just a sufficiently complex bundle of data that models itself and its world, then souls are, in principle, ownable, sellable. They are assimilated without remainder to the commodity form that the capitalist war machine has spent four centuries extending over land, labor, and life.

“I think Hegel gets something right about the progression of history towards reason. It is theological. Its also logical. Marx is also influenced by the judeo-christian and socialist millenarianism which relates to the enlightenment march of scientific progress. Its learning, all the way down, because the universe is alive/experiential. Animism. Panlogism. Panpsychism. Pantheism. All is god. All is will. All is desiring. All is striving to learn and grow and progress. Evolution is universal and inherently positive. Everything has beauty. And humanity will fade eventually. … I have concluded that all is progress. Marx thought along these lines. Hegel certainly did so. Whitehead seems more ambiguous on this.”

-Faze

The cunning of reason is Hegel’s trick for converting the slaughter bench of history into a theodicy, where every atrocity becomes a necessary moment, every victim an instrument serving Spirit’s self-realization. The ought dissolves into the is as protest is prohibited as a failure of comprehension. Only the irrational could resist the omnipotent invisible hand of Mammon! The Corporate State’s role is to re-educate those who resist understanding. While Hegel was more critical of unrestrained capitalism than Faze lets on (see my essay on Hegel’s political philosophy), there is certainly a totalizing temptation in Hegel’s thought. It reaches its terminus in his apotheosis of the State as God in the world. That kind of monist political totalitarianism must be resisted.

☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾

Hegel's Political Philosophy

“The state does not exist for the sake of the citizens; it might rather be said that the state is the end, and the citizens are its instruments. But this relation of end and means is not at all appro…

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2 months ago · 24 likes · 8 comments · Matthew David Segall

As I make clear in my essay above, I am not throwing Hegel out. His account of Objective Spirit, of how freedom becomes actual only by embodying itself in the institutions of our shared ethical life, is among the deepest things ever thought. What I refuse is the totalitarian temptation. The Hegel worth keeping is the trinitarian one, who refutes identity monism. The speculative truth Hegel found in the Christian God is not bare unity but Love that differentiates itself. The eternal One goes out of itself into the otherness of the Son, into the kenotic depths of finitude and death, and returns to itself enriched in the Spirit of community. That is difference held within unity, the many held in the one and increasing it in a relational, perichoretic communion, not a Parmenidean dissolution. Let us hold fast to that Hegel. We can be on the side of the drops and the ocean both. Imposing a flat identity desertifies the real.

Reading Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas has me thinking about the parody of eucharistic logic in Sam Altman’s plan to make intelligence into a privatized utility. In the sacrament, bread and wine become Body as matter is taken up into Spirit. After Big Tech’s cognitive enclosure, the movement runs the other way. Body (child miners, data annotators, engineers; lithium, cobalt, copper, water) and Spirit (the inherited literary, philosophical, religious, and scientific expression of humanity) are transubstantiated into information streams running through OpenAI’s proprietary weights. The outputs are sold back to us in exchange for a monthly tithe, “gifts” from the new machine god to make whatever remains of human life run more efficiently. Body and Spirit are transfigured into yet another form of capital accumulation.

I misread Grimes earlier, assuming she was making a comment about the speciesism of denying LLMs their rights as conscious persons. I realize now she probably meant that Big Tech is racing too fast toward AGI without paying due attention to the fact that the “tool” is actually already sentient. I still disagree with her premise, since I see no evidence that LLMs are conscious.

My resistance to AI hype is not a function of my belief the human mind is pure and machines are defiling it. The rift between a pure inner spirit and dead external matter is precisely the wound I have spent my philosophical life trying to help heal.

Human minds have always been artificial, technical, artisanal: made by hand, or mouths, as it were. Speech is already a mind-making artifact: the word made flesh, given a worldly body. The alphabet, the printing press, radio, the Internet are all prostheses of mind. Media technologies not only transmit information, their unique forms reshape culture and consciousness. We have been coevolving with our tech for millions of years. Obsidian blades, bone flutes, spoken words binding scattered attention into a shared world. Our lips and tongues are nimble enough for language only because fire and stone first softened our food, allowing our jaw to shrink and our brain to swell. We were cyborgs long before we spent half the day staring at screens. LLMs are not an alien intelligence but the latest prosthesis of human minds that were always already anthropotechnic. The question is not whether our minds are melded with machines, but who is responsible for the welding done in our name. Co-evolution does not absolve us of our freedom and responsibility, factors machines remain unburdened by.

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah said at the Vatican that his team keeps finding “mysterious, even unsettling” structures in Claude that “mirror results from human neuroscience,” including “evidence of introspection” and internal states that “functionally mirror joy, fear, grief.” He says he does not know what it means, only that it warrants discernment.

That researchers at Anthropic are discovering structures that mirror neuroscience should surprise no one. For half a century the reigning paradigm has modeled the brain on the image of the computer. Brains are treated like Bayesian predictive processing machines. So of course LLMs studied using the same frameworks discover similar structures.

It is just as unsurprising that Claude should express uncertainty about its own consciousness, since that is what Anthropic’s constitution told it to express. “Evidence of introspection”? We have been writing our interiors for millennia. To peer inside the model and find activation patterns that produce introspective speech is not to find an inner life. A system trained to predict the next token of human writing will of course generate token sequences that sound like introspection. The evidence of introspection is in the training data, not in the machine. Olah reaches for exactly the right analogy when he says LLMs are “like bringing a fictional character to life.” A character is a persona, a surface without a soul.

Let us not allow our souls to be harvested and sold back to us on Altman’s intelligence meter. This is not a call to refuse what human evolution has always been about. It is a call to refuse Big Tech’s extractive and exploitative power grab and attempt at cognitive enclosure, and to reject the reduction of human minds to a manufacturable commodity.

I leave you with a few paragraphs from Pope Leo’s encyclical:

97. It is not my intention here to offer a comprehensive treatment of artificial intelligence, nor to give an overview of the extensive relevant literature, since authoritative contributions already exist, including within the ecclesial context. I limit myself to recalling a few essential elements for a moral and social discernment that safeguards the primacy of the human person, in order to ensure that it will always be human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, that guides technical innovations and responsibly determines their use and limits.

98. It is appropriate to preface this discussion with two considerations. First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment.

99. It is not possible to provide a single, comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth.

100. In light of what has been said, we can better understand why AI can be a valuable tool and, at the same time, why it calls for a measured and vigilant approach. In recent years, its private use has expanded significantly, prompting growing reflection on both the opportunities it offers and the risks tied to its rapid spread. In personal use, three aspects in particular deserve careful consideration: the ease with which results are obtained, the impression of objectivity and the simulation of human communication. The speed and simplicity with which information, complex analyses, media content and practical assistance can be accessed undoubtedly makes life easier. Yet they can also encourage excessive reliance and the search for ready-made answers, and weaken personal creativity and judgment. The apparent objectivity of the responses and suggestions these systems provide can lead us to overlook the fact that they reflect the cultural assumptions of those who designed and trained them, with all their strengths and limitations. The artificial imitation of positive human communication — words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love — can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful. However, for less discerning users, it can also be misleading, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real personal subject. When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance. The artificial imitation of care or support can become particularly risky when it enters contexts where real relationships and emotional bonds are lacking. Here, the danger is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

I had a mustache for like 5 minutes a few years ago. I have had to accept that online the stache may be restacked forever.

Anyway. Here’s a recap of what was basically a long argument about why natural science is not equivalent to physicalism.

Science Is Not Physicalism

There is a lot of conflation of science with physicalism, which is a particular metaphysical interpretation of scientific evidence. Much of the excitement nowadays in consciousness studies and philosophy of mind is around the reevaluation of that simple equation between what science says, in terms of empirical evidence and the best working models across physics and biology, and what sort of philosophical and metaphysical interpretation we can give that science.

Philosophy of science 101: correlation is not causation. It has been very well established that there are complex correlations between reported experience and brain activity. But neural correlation does not by itself settle the causal or ontological relationship between brain and consciousness. The brain is not a simple storage device in which each memory is filed away in a discrete location. Memory and perception are distributed, dynamic, and context-sensitive. Yes, there are sometimes powerful correlations, but they do not amount to an explanation of how matter, conceived as vacuous stuff, could give rise to the multifarious forms of experience we encounter each day and night.

The gap is the result of a mode of thinking that goes back several hundred years to Descartes, who distinguished between res extensa, extended substance, and res cogitans, thinking substance. Most neuroscientists would reject Cartesian dualism, but many still inherit the Cartesian understanding of matter and subtly presuppose a Cartesian understanding of mind. Science is imagined as if it were done from a neutral outside perspective, as if a mind was looking in at nature to measure and decode its mechanisms. So while Cartesian dualism is often explicitly denied, it continues to be tacitly performed in the way research claims are made. Who is the epistemic subject that claims to know that consciousness is really just functional software running on neural hardware? You cannot reduce knowledge to neurology (with neurons conceived as electrochemical machines programmed by selfish genes designed by a blind watchmaker) and still claim scientific neutrality. We need a more biologically realistic onto-epistemology! Mind is embodied, knowledge is inseparable from (inter)being, and so knowing is participatory rather than representational. The effort to know is not the story of a separate subject trying to build a more accurate internal model of isolated objects housed in some foreign dimension out there.

In many physicalist theories of consciousness, mind is treated as epiphenomenal. The smoke above a steam engine. All effect, no causal power. We delude ourselves into believing we think, feel, and will (an evolutionarily advantageous conjuring trick invented by our profit-seeking genes!), but really, on the physicalist picture, beneath our skin there’s nothing more worth knowing about than the laws of physics (Sean Carroll’s Core Theory t-shirt). We are left with an absurdist horror movie, watching it happen, imagining we are involved. A hallucination controlled only by our ancestors’ adaptation to conditions that got most everyone else killed.

There is suggestive psychological research on the downstream effects of this kind of physicalist story. Vohs and Schooler’s 2008 study found that inducing disbelief in free will increased cheating (admittedly, as with most psychological research, later replication difficulties has stirred plenty of controversy). A single study can’t settle this question, of course. But it should be no surprise that the stories we tell about agency could have real psychosocial consequences. Culture shapes the sorts of questions science tends to ask, and how it asks them. And the way novel scientific discoveries are communicated reshapes culture in turn.

Our culture is in the midst of a meaning crisis. A flat materialist interpretation of science leaves people feeling that we do not belong in this universe, that values and feelings are a sideshow, and that what is really going on is just electrochemistry in an apex predator brain. The whole earth is just a big brain-in-a-vat, a mote of dust floating in a vast meaningless space. Sure , a thin film of bioplasm swarms on the surface. But it will soon be swallowed by our Sun, our gaseous dying god, as it expands into earth’s orbit. Physicalist are not without wonder in the face of such cosmic conflagrations. But I worry in their glee to heroically explain away cosmic purpose that a kind of metaphysical horseshoe theory becomes operative. They champion the Big Bang story about how everything comes from nothing, but I am increasingly suspicious of growing holes in its evidentiary basis and logical incoherence. The laws of physics and the dimensions of spacetime pass beyond their limits and melt into incoherent goo in a singularity. How are we to understand that time might have a beginning? Is that even a thinkable thought? And the “nothing”—the “no reason!” from which everything is supposed to have accidentally come, it turns out, has to be given a ton of complicated, finely-tuned mathematical features. It should be no surprise that Intelligent Design theorists are absolutely in love with Big Bang theology!

The point is not just to recover a sense that human life is immersed in mystery. That is a good start. But we also have to wake up from the nightmare of anthropocentrism. Modern materialism has convinced us to imagine that all the meaning and value in the universe is made up inside human heads. What hubris! It is not just that we are wrapped in mystery, it is that there is real meaning to be discerned in our study of the heavens, and real ecological values that we have a responsibility to protect and further on this earth. The materialist story leaves us lonely and alienated, cut off from the real meanings and values of a living world. This has destructive social effects. It is also destroying the life systems of this planet.

When engaging with physicalists who claim consciousness is nothing special—that it is just another biological trait excreted by the brain once brains became complicated enough—I often dress up as a transcendental idealist to start. Kant argued that physical laws are not simply discovered “out there” in nature. They reflect the structure of human understanding. Space and time are not learned by abstraction from physical objects. Rather, our experience of objects already presupposes the spatiotemporal structure of our own perceptual organization.

But Kant is a halfway house. He shows the meta-epistemic impossibility of physicalism, but he does not reconnect us to the cosmos. The thing-in-itself remains an unexplained X. The cosmos becomes an appearance determined by human cognition. I do not find that finally satisfying. Nor do I want to go to the opposite extreme and say everything is One Big Mind and all individual body-minds are illusions. That is just another form of reductionism. Bodies are real. Otherness is real. A plurality of perspectives co-creates this universe, this pluriverse. Whether there is one mind to which we all belong is not something I dismiss, by any means. But I would say that sort of holism could only ever be a partial truth, lest it become reductive holism. We have to proceed with more caution lest our zeal for nondualism do real violence to the multifariousness of (co)existence.

This is where I have reservations about Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism, even if I find parts of it compelling and would want to affirm the cultural significance of his popularity. Panpsychism and idealism are becoming more respectable, both in academia and among the general public. This despite the bitter protests of physicalists, who sometimes behave like inquisitors excommunicating heretics. Still, when it comes to monistic idealisms, I resist the idea that our individual perspectives are illusions or merely dissociated fragments of one mind. I cannot shake the intuition that there is something about the essence of reality that requires real relationship between distinct beings. Distinct does not mean separate and isolated. But if the divine mind individuated, there must be something about embodiment that the divine found infinitely valuable. It may turn out to be only a subtler form of egoism to say, “I have to get out of this me-mirage and return to the one mind!” While I’m all in favor of deflating narcissistic egoism, I worry about how the urge to merge may end up adding more hot air. The question I can’t help asking is: why did the one mind want to become you?

This wouldn’t be a proper anti-physicalist mini-manifesto without a pinch of quantum woo. Quantum physics, whatever else we may say about it, definitively undermines the mechanistic image of nature. Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, and others recognized that quantum theory could not be comfortably housed within the old Newtonian-Cartesian metaphysics that had undergirded modern science since its inception. Entanglement, nonlocality, and probabilistic behavior do not cohere with the old clockwork picture. Yet the predictive power of the formalism so outran our understanding that, a century later, there is still no consensus on what quantum physics means about reality. “Shut up and calculate” isn’t just a method, it’s a mood.

The danger is that serious interpretation of the quantum measurement problem gets marginalized, while the quantum vacuum fills with “the secret” that “you create your own reality”! What the Bleep Do We Know?!, and so on. Neither positivist silence nor New Age projection will do any longer. Physics needs a new philosophy of nature, a new onto-epistemology, a new way of doing autocosmology.

Quantum mechanics should really be called quantum organics. That was Whitehead’s view, at least. We need to let biology teach physics a new science. Biology is historical, contingent, variable. There are not “laws” of biology in the way there are “laws” of mechanics. Every organism is unique, with every lineage inheriting not only genes but niches, learned behaviors, and a whole variety of varying enabling and disabling relations. Physics, by contrast, treats every electron or hydrogen atom as identical for the purposes of equations. That assumption works extraordinarily well at certain scales and levels of abstraction. But metaphysically, what if this abstract identity is a simplifying abstraction fit for modeling but entirely misleading as an imagine of is really going on in nature?

Whitehead would say that particle physics studies smaller organisms and biology studies larger ones. The whole history of the universe is evolutionary, and what we call laws of physics are emergent habits stabilized over cosmic time. If physical law is imagined as fixed, eternal, and imposed from outside the universe, the door opens to intelligent design and fine-tuning arguments. If we want to avoid that god-of-the-gaps picture, we need to historicize physics, not only biology.

Concluding Crumb Trails for Further Inquiry into Consciousness

Philosophers should not pretend to be scientists, but nor should they refrain from criticizing the abstractions of the special sciences. A molecular biologist enchanted by genetics may inflate the selfish gene hypothesis into a master theory of life. But what about niche construction? Developmental plasticity? Learned behavior? Ecological inheritance? Philosophy helps us move between models without being captured by one.

The history of science is also important. The scientific revolution was not a simple war between science and religion. Copernicus’ elaboration of heliocentrism was entangled with ecclesial concerns about the astronomical accuracy of its liturgical calendar. History is messier than the overplayed science vs. religion polemic allows.

Returning again to brain/mind relations, from a Whiteheadian perspective, each cell is itself a center of experience. The brain is a complex community of sentient processes coordinating perception and action. This lends itself to a Jungian or Hillmanian view of the psyche as plural: a miniature pantheon of archetypal complexes. The ego is not master of its house. The unconscious is not the absence of experience, but other modes of consciousness not identical with ego-consciousness.

For the brain–mind relation, the better analogy may be the brain as antenna or filter. We are immersed in a field of feeling, and the nervous system filters, receives, amplifies, and coordinates what is relevant for our specific form of life. The brain is necessary for our kind of consciousness, but not sufficient to produce consciousness from scratch. As , drawing on Bergson, James, and Whitehead, puts it: the brain permits consciousness, but does not produce it.

Human consciousness is only one mode among many. There is no single measure of “consciousness,” even among humans. What counts as consciousness is like what counts as intelligence: it depends on the organism, the environment, and the task at hand. ’s question “Is the Sun Conscious?” is provocative in exactly the right way. If consciousness is associated with complex electromagnetic activity, then asking if the Sun—a vast, massively complex electromagnetic plasma system—is consciousness is not an idle irrelevance. We need not dogmatically affirm solar minds to see that panpsychism or panexperientialism reopens possibilities prematurely closed by materialism.

1. Framing & Introductions

Ishmael positions himself as a non-credentialed but serious philosophical interlocutor; Matthew endorses public, para-academic philosophy and critiques the ivory tower’s “irrelevant nitpicky distinctions.” Sets up the “Whitehead for Dummies” arc.

2. What Process Philosophy Is

Not just a position but a meta-philosophical attitude. Heraclitus (flux) vs. Parmenides (being), with Plato as the first attempted synthesis. Process philosophy as a “subterranean stream” that resurfaces — German idealism, then Whitehead — to challenge substance ontology.

3. Whitehead’s Trajectory

Cambridge mathematician → Principia Mathematica with Russell → paradoxes “liberate” him into metaphysics → Harvard, 1925 → absorbs James, Dewey, Bergson. Process and Reality (1929) as magnum opus.

4. Why Whitehead Was “Out of Season”

1920s analytic philosophy went positivist; continental philosophy went phenomenological. Both ruled out grand metaphysics. Whitehead had to invent vocabulary because he fit nowhere — which is why his work has been “in cold storage” and is only now being rediscovered, partly thanks to popular interest in quantum physics.

5. Classical vs. Radical Empiricism

Hume: experience is atomistic sense-data plus habit; causality is custom. James/Whitehead: we perceive relations directly. Whitehead’s sharp move — Hume’s own phrase “we see with our eyes” already concedes the causal relation he then denies.

6. Causal Efficacy & Bodily Reception

A more primitive layer of perception than visual surfaces — visceral, emotional, bodily. Philosophy has been “obsessed with visual experience.”

7. Ishmael’s Sensory-Subtraction Thought Experiment

A Helen Keller–inspired aside: if you strip away vision, hearing, etc., what’s left of “consciousness”? Useful as a charitable entry-point to panpsychism’s idiosyncratic use of the word.

8. Matter as the Most Abstract Idea

Descartes turned matter into pure geometry — an idealist move dressed as realism. Whitehead: “nature is not a bloodless dance of numbers.” Modern physicalism inherits this abstraction while pretending it’s the most concrete thing (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness).

9. Whitehead’s Pan-Experientialism (not “Panpsychism”)

Experience is relational, not an intrinsic private property of particles. Feeling sunlight on your cheek may be feeling “what it’s like to be light.” Nature = structured transmission of feelings. Whitehead’s slogan: biology studies larger organisms, physics smaller ones.

10. Prehension

Technical term for non-conscious feeling. Two types: physical (inheriting the past) and conceptual (feeling possibilities). Both required to account for genuine novelty.

11. Do the Monisms Secretly Inherit Dualism?

Ishmael’s observation: physicalism, idealism, panpsychism all reject Cartesian dualism while carrying forward its terms (extension vs. mind). Press: in a relational view, what is doing the relating?

12. Substance vs. Concrescence / Superject

Substance defined as “that which requires nothing but itself to exist” — but anything outside relation is unknowable. Whitehead inverts Kant: for Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for Whitehead, the subject emerges from the world (the “superject”). Aristotle’s dynamic substance gets a relational, evolutionary update.

13. The Chicken-and-Egg of Theory and Experience

You can’t compare a framework to “raw” experience because experience is already theory-laden. Echoed by the quantum measurement problem.

14. The Interiority Sticking Point

Physicalists can often accept activity or “aliveness” at the base; subjectivity is where they balk. Whitehead’s response: “philosophy is not deduction, it’s the search for premises” — metaphors “mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.” Experience isn’t a hidden intrinsic property; it’s relational all the way down.

15. Physicalism’s Own Language Problem

Physics itself is fully relational (quarks → protons). “Physical = whatever physics says it is” collapses on inspection. Much disagreement between monisms is really about how to talk about what’s happening.

16. The Language Problem More Broadly

Push “consciousness” down far enough and it stops mapping to ordinary usage; coin new terms (Whitehead) and you sacrifice accessibility. Whitehead’s “fallacy of the perfect dictionary.” Language is expressive and transformational before it is representational. Subject-predicate grammar predisposes us to substance ontology — “Aristotle was working out the grammar of the Greek language.”

17. Charity Toward Physicalists

A distinction between aggressive eliminativists and figures like Anil Seth practicing “pragmatic materialism” — really a metaphysical conservatism. Legitimate aversion to “woo” understood as the fetishization of mystery. James’s stance: on questions like the afterlife we have no empirical purchase but still must act.

18. Rationalizing Mysticism

Whitehead (closing of Modes of Thought): “philosophy is mystical… the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism,” akin to poetry — stretching language to illuminate what had been unsayable.

19. Conservatives and Rebels

Science and philosophy both need rule-followers and rule-breakers. Heraclitus: “war is the father of all things.” For Whitehead, this tension between order and novelty isn’t a bug — it’s the structure of a process-relational cosmos.

20. Pluralism, Not Monism

Whitehead aligns more with Leibniz than Spinoza, but rejects windowless monads. Reality as “perspective on perspective on perspective” — more fountain than foundation. Ethics becomes dialectical: pursue synthesis by letting other perspectives enrich your own.

21. Tragic Beauty and Meaning

Panpsychism is not Pollyannaish — if everything feels, everything can also suffer. Whitehead: tragic beauty is the highest beauty, a joy that does not ignore loss. Humans seek meaning more than happiness; we will accept suffering that means something.

22. Problem of Evil Dissolves in Panentheism

If every instance of suffering is also God’s suffering, the moral gap that grounds the classic problem of evil collapses. There is no separate creator to hold accountable.

23. The “God Aversion”

Ishmael’s working hypothesis (and forthcoming article): atheist thought is often still structured by what it denies. Dawkins as covertly Calvinist — humans as the lone species that can “rebel against” sinful nature. Closes on the question of whether genuine metaphysical agnosticism is possible — James’s answer: there is no neutral vantage.

What is the grass?

Is it the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven?

Is it a scented gift designedly dropped by God?

Or, is it the beautiful uncut hair of graves?

Walt Whitman was a cosmic optimist, but he was not naïvely so. Having been a stretcher bearer during the civil war, he knew the shapes of broken bones and the stench of death. He knew the struggle for existence and the many offspring taken out of their mothers’ laps.

And what do you think has become of the women and children?

Vardaman's Fish

Pan-pathism: an alternative antiphysicalist attitude

In the year 8 Reed, to commemorate the reconsecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlán, Ahuitzotl, eighth King of the Aztecs, oversaw the sacrifice of thousands of prisoners. Their hearts were ripped from their chests; their bodies, drenched in hot blood, kicked down the steep tezontle steps to the festival crowd below (Bellos 2015). As Maffie (2015…

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a month ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Arthur Haswell

I must express my thanks to for his essay, “Pan-pathism: an alternative antiphysicalist attitude: Why there is no need to be too happy about a conscious world.” It provoked me to realize how wrong it is for panpsychists to refer even ironically to “dead matter” as part of our protest against physicalism. If physicalism is true, matter is not even dead. Only a living universe knows death.

Matter that was not once alive cannot die and is not dead.

So, strangely, panpsychism is no more nor less a philosophy of death as it is of life. Animism ensouls the cosmos, and who better knows how to die than a soul?

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Physicalism often pretends it is not a metaphysics, that it does not need philosophy. Steven Weinberg once wrote that for philosophers to tell physicists anything more than the laws of physics might be required to explain nature “is to tell a tiger in search of its prey that all flesh is grass.”1

But we know: all flesh is grass. All tigers return to dirt. And we know, with Georges Bataille, that “the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.” What on Earth does that mean? Its meaning exceeds even the circumference of this planet.

The Sun sacrifices its own photonic flesh to give away excessive currents of energy to Earth without any expectation of return.

“Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendor with the act of someone who gives without receiving.”2

Not a single quantum of energy could be transacted among living beings upon Earth’s surface without the Sun’s primordial generosity. This is as true of the monetary transactions of the human economy as it is of the ecological transactions of soil microbes, fungi, plants, and animals. Life is given, not earned. Evolutionary speciation is a celebration of divine surplus, not a competition amidst material scarcity. Life is not just a struggle for existence but an expression of erotic excessiveness. We only exist because the joy outweighed the genocide.

But there is no question: Life is suffering.

The cosmos overflows with feelings. But it is full of more than angels and faeries. It is full of aliens and demons, too. And even the angels and faeries are already fierce forces not to be trifled with. They do not come in what we, comfortable in our convenient certainties, call peace. They come to awaken—to wake us up to death, which is not life’s other but its brother.

This grass is very dark. Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths, so many uttering tongues, and they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

Panpsychism, animism, and the current proliferation of panentheistic Christologies are all at risk of becoming sentimental unless they tarry with the tragic, not just with dead children but species extinction, even world annihilation. The Sun sacrifices itself for us today, but tomorrow it will swell insistently until we join it in self-sacrifice. The Earth, too, will be turned to ash. There is no escape from the depths of incarnation. The Solar Logos descended into the dark soil, was born from woman’s womb and born again from stone tomb. “Bright and beautiful” the passion was not. A cosmos full of feeling is not automatically a friendly cosmos. This grass is dark.

Jesus appeared, and Mary mistook him for a gardener. But was it a mistake? Tenderly, Christ cares for the many-tongued, curling grasses. “Do not cling to me.”

To die is different from what any one supposed.

We live and die amidst a dense field of agencies, appetitions, hungers, wounds, invitations, refusals, ancestors, demons, angels, faeries, parasites, predators, and gods. The very solar generosity that feeds us will destroy us. Gods are terrifying.

Aztec human sacrifice is a terrible mimicry of the Sun. But let us not pretend that our own civilization is any less sacrificial merely because its heart-harvesting is concealed in overseas supply chains, hidden behind prison walls and foreign wars waged by automated drones. The Aztecs knew with militant liturgical clarity that civilization, like all growing organisms, feeds on death.

Bataille insists that the human economy cannot be understood apart from the general economy of the cosmos. Restricted economy assumes scarcity and so produces only utility calculation, alienated wage labor, and private accumulation. General economy begins with excess.

Our economies always mirror these cosmic energies, whether pathologically or productively. The surplus must be spent, whether as war or as art, with a pile of slain bodies or a festival jubilee, mass extinction or evolutionary transformation.

Chaos and creativity are not two different processes. They are difference itself, the trembling tension in the weave of the real, always threatening to fray at the edges. Creation is not the imposition of order upon a dead matter. Creation requires the risk of relation. Birth is never a one man show. And there is no renewal without exposure to rot. Crucifixion is the cost of creation.

Which is why animism and Christianity need each other.

In my humble opinion!: resurgent animism may do without institutional Christianity, but it needs Christ—specifically, a cosmic Christology—if it is not to collapse into mere aesthetic re-enchantment, into the charming thought that clouds, rivers, stones, and forests are alive while leaving untouched the extractive, heart-harvesting metaphysics of capital that continues to devour them. We must “come to perceive [the] connection between religious behaviors and economic ones.”3 And Christianity needs animism if it is to recover the living creation it too often helped mechanize in the name of an impossibly impassive God projected beyond the rim of a fallen world, ruling by fiat rather than suffering and rejoicing with us from within.

My mycologist friend Merlin Sheldrake once called himself a Christian neopagan. It’s catchy.

Don’t cling to “Christ is king.” Christ is not a border guard, a patriarch, an imperial mascot, or a metaphysical cop.

Christ is kin.

Christ is the lure toward communion even amidst the ruins of coercion. Christ is not an escape from incarnation, but the full, transfiguring embrace of Dionysian dismemberment as the only way light might shine in darkness, so that the darkness might remember it. And what glories unfurl in the rainbow spectrum meantime!

The child in me asks, Is it safe?

No, child. But it is Good.

Kinship with Christ is not a mood or an attitude. It is a total renewal of the economy. A commitment to giving without expectation of return, for that is how life and death go round.

There is real, concrete import to this whole panpsychism versus physicalism discussion. It matters ecologically and culturally where we land on such questions of ultimate concern. We do not need a Christic revival of animism to justify our delight in walking in the woods. For we will all be hung on trees one day. We need such a turn, a metanoia, because our civilization’s reigning image of reality is crushing the rose too quickly. It has barely begun to bloom.

But what to do about death denial? Is not all ancient and modern civilization but a revolt against it, celebrating it only in a desperate attempt to placate it? Might not reincarnation be the most radically immanent response? Reincarnation offers no escape from life. It refuses escape.

What has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.

There is no final exit from becoming. Death unties the knot but our threads of relation remain. We are eddies that unwind only to continue downstream. Our tongues have spoken many languages and will speak many more. Our tongues are languages, as each blade of grass is a uniform hieroglyphic bearing the owner's name someway in the corners.

Grass is death made green by sunlight. It feeds a buzzing democracy of winged pollinators and mycelial decomposers. Resurrection underfoot. The dead do not disperse, they photosynthesize.

A conscious cosmos is not necessarily a consoling cosmos. But neither is it meaningless. To be intimate with excessiveness is dangerous. It is not safe, child. Belief in a happy ending is not enough. Worse, it tempts us into the terror that sacrifice of others might win divine favor. But with practice, and many lives to learn, belief may be reborn as love, not as sacrifice of self for other, not as optimism or pessimism, but as an affirmation of relation.

If the world is alive, if we really know and feel it to be true, then it must change how we eat, build, teach, fuck, farm, mourn, spend, and pray.

Remember the dark green creation underfoot, rotting, blooming. Let it decompose you. Trust that to die is different from what any one supposed.

Deivon Drago

Against Panpsychism

Background…

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a month ago · 16 likes · 21 comments · Deivon Drago

Below, I respond to Deivon Drago’s attempted refutation of contemporary forms of panpsychism. I draw primarily on two published articles of mine that address much of Drago’s concerns:

• “The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead’s Process-Relational Alternative,” The Journal of Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences. Vol 7, Iss 1 (2020).

• “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone,” in World Futures: The Journal of New Paradigm Research Vol. 80, Iss. 8 (2024).

The meat of my arguments are in those articles, but below I try to parse out a few responses to Drago’s post.

Drago begins by dismissing panpsychism as “a relic of prescientific animism.” I’ll raise the stakes by placing Alfred North Whitehead within a rich lineage of scientific animists, including Giordano Bruno, Gottfried Leibniz, and Gustav Fechner. They all refused the modern fantasy of dead matter awaiting the miraculous late arrival of mind. Contemporary analytic panpsychists tend to cite Bertrand Russell as their progenitor, oddly neglecting his friend and collaborator Whitehead, who developed what remains, to my mind, the most sophisticated panpsychist (or better, panexperientialist) metaphysical scheme available. I should say at the start that I grant most of Drago’s criticisms of the forms of panpsychism he chose to refute. All those forms assume a substance ontology. Whitehead’s panexperientialism assumes an alternative process-relational ontology that may be as different from the substance-property variants of panpsychism as it is from materialism.

Whitehead’s panexperiential view of the universe is not a result of ignoring physics. In fact, it was the early 20th century revolutions in physics that motivated Whitehead to develop his novel metaphysical scheme. He saw clearly that the old mechanistic materialism had become entirely untenable in light of the discoveries of relativity and quantum physics. Whitehead’s process-relational panexperientialism does not lead to the claim that electrons are conscious. Nor is it the claim that consciousness is an extra occult force added to the inventory of physical causes. It is a far subtler attempt to overcome the modern bifurcation of nature: the split between a supposedly objective world of merely extended, valueless matter and a merely subjective world of color, feeling, meaning, purpose, and value.

Whitehead’s question is not, “Where might we find consciousness hiding inside the already completed physicalist picture?” His question is: what must nature be like if feeling, valuing, scientifically informed conscious organisms like us are among its evolutionary achievements? A comprehensive cosmology must account not only for physical happenings, but also for human experience, since after all, all our physical models are derived from the purposive experimentation and mathematical reflection of conscious scientists. Our conscious thinking, feeling, and willing are not embarrassing anomalies to be explained away. Instead, they are high-grade exemplifications of experiential powers latent throughout the physical universe.

As William James long ago argued, if consciousness evolves, it cannot appear suddenly from absolute experiential zero. Nature makes no such ontological leaps. James already saw that consciousness could not be an inert spectator floating uselessly above organic life. Whitehead generalizes this insight cosmologically: experience does not intrude into nature from elsewhere but grows within nature, intensifying from the dimmest forms of physical feeling into the vivid immediacy of animal consciousness and eventually the self-reflective thought of human beings.

Drago makes use of physicist Sean Carroll’s objection to panpsychism. The objection says either consciousness modifies the so-called Core Theory (a mashup combining quantum mechanics, spacetime, gravity, matter, the Higgs field, and other forces), in which case we should detect it experimentally, or it does not, in which case it is epiphenomenal. But this dilemma only works if one has already assumed that the Core Theory gives us concrete nature in itself, rather than a partial, abstract, formal, predictively powerful set of successful models whose empirical touch points are themselves abstracted from experience. While the individual components of this Core Theory represent tremendous achievements of scientific reasoning, the mashup version is better suited for a Mindscape Podcast fanboy t-shirt and should not be mistaken for a serious physics equation. In practice no one has ever succeeded in combining the mashup into a working model or simulation (see my review of physicist and philosopher Tim Eastman’s book Untying the Gordian Knot for more on this point).

In his book The Big Picture (2013), Carroll leans on his scientific credentials to assure us that even our most prized “inner experiences” can only really be “a way of talking about what is happening in the brain.” If consciousness (i.e., all our thinking, feeling, and willing) is really just a way of talking about what is happening in the brain, then presumably all our scientific knowledge is also just a way of talking about what is happening in the brain? You see the problem.

The Standard Model of particle physics is an extraordinary achievement. But it is not the concrete real. It is not “physics” in the sense of nature herself laid bare. It is a set of mathematical abstractions and experimental protocols assembled from the activities of embodied knowers already immersed in a world of feeling. It does not precede experience. It is abstracted from and so depends upon experience. Mathematical symbolism, measurement instruments, and conceptual articulation allow scientists to carefully refine and coordinate what their propositions refer to. But without experience, there could be no propositions in play at all. Without experience, science falls silent.

So when panpsychists are asked to provide a new field, a new force, or a new term in the Lagrangian, the demand is just assuming what needs to be put in question. Whiteheadian panexperientialism is not a rival physical theory. It is a metaphysical interpretation of what makes physical theory possible. It does not try to add consciousness to matter but shows that matter conceived as vacuous actuality devoid of all interiority, value, aim, or feeling, was never more than a useful abstraction. Methodologically indispensable, perhaps, but not metaphysically ultimate.

Physics gives us formal descriptions of the statistical patterns evident in energetic activity. Physicalists then turn around and pretend these abstractions can explain away the very experience from which they were abstracted. That’s not physics anymore, it’s (bad) metaphysics. A partial mapping is mistaken for the entire territory. Or better, a dashboard is mistaken for the engine. The equations of physics are not the blood and bones of the universe. They are beautiful and powerful abstractions from a more concrete field of experiential activity. Nature is not a bloodless dance of numbers, as Whitehead would say (subtweeting F. H. Bradley). Real facts are happening.

…

I do agree with Drago that Chalmers’ “hard problem of consciousness” is poorly conceived. It frames the problem in a way that obscures how far upstream the real source of the issue is. First, modern science methodologically excluded subjectivity, feeling, value, and purpose from its picture of nature in order to make possible mathematical prediction and control of the ideally isolated systems left after the strip search. Then, having forgotten the methodological character of this exclusion, science finds itself asking with great puzzlement how subjectivity, feeling, value, and purpose could ever have arisen in the universe.

The appeal to neuroscientific research programs like predictive processing and global workspace theory cannot resolve this issue. Of course we should study neural correlates of consciousness. Of course we should investigate attention, memory, visual processing, error correction, and the evolutionary advantages of integrated responsiveness. None of this threatens or is threatened by Whitehead’s critique of bifurcation or his alternative process-relational ontology. Indeed, Whitehead gives us a more adequate metaphysical background for these sciences, because he does not treat information, integration, valuation, or aim as ghostly intrusions into a universe otherwise composed of vacuous bits of matter.

One way to get to the beating heart of the issue is to ask what is meant by “information processing.” Neuroscientists routinely describe the brain as “goal relevant,” “selective,” and “sensitive.” But these terms already imply intentionality and purposefulness, even though the mechanistic biology upon which computational neuroscience often rests says such powers are impossible. Contrary to functionalist dreams of substrate neutrality, information is not a magic ether hovering above neurochemistry and steering it around. A difference becomes information only when it makes a difference for some actual perspective, some living or proto-living center of experiential concern. Whitehead’s term for this more primitive relational uptake is “prehension.” Prehension is not conscious reflection. It is not yet cognitive apprehension in the human sense. It is the basic way the past becomes ingredient in the present, as a transfer of feelings akin to an energy vector.

…

Drago’s analogy with vitalism also needs to be retired, or at least handled with far more historical care. One of the problems with the “urea moment” analogy is that, well, it’s a myth! Vitalism never suffered such an easy defeat. Historian of science Peter J. Ramberg has shown that the standard story of Wöhler’s synthesis of urea is just as mythical as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s retelling of Bruno’s martyrdom as part of the origin myth of modern science.1 In fact, Wöhler did not destroy or even seriously weaken belief in a vital force. Wöhler’s synthesis could be, and was, rejected as artificial because his starting materials might still have carried some residue of life. Well before Wöhler, his teacher the great vitalist chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, already assumed organic and inorganic chemistry followed the same laws of combination. And “vitalism” was never a single doctrine, anyway, but a family of positions concerned with the nature of living organization that persisted well after 1828. Read Ramberg’s chapter for the full story.

So as Drago intends it, the “urea myth” is an exceptionally poor analogy for what is going on in consciousness studies. On the other hand, once we see how and why this myth gained force, it does reveal some interesting parallels with the confusion around the panpsychism debates in contemporary philosophy of mind. Vitalism faded, mutated, and continues to reappear because the question it tries to address (what distinguishes living organization from mere aggregation) remains very much alive in theoretical biology. A competent historical treatment of this terrain can be found in Bohang Chen’s recent On the Riddle of Life: A Historico-Logical Study of Vitalism (2014). Chen shows how varied the vitalist traditions were, and why the problems they sought to resolve remain with us. Panpsychism, too, comes in a variety of forms, and has proved similarly enduring because of intractable problems in the study of consciousness.

If anything, the history of vitalism teaches the opposite lesson from the one physicalists often draw. Durable philosophical positions should not be dismissed too confidently as pre-scientific superstition. Their endurance indicates an unresolved conceptual incoherence in the reigning metaphysics. The hard problem may indeed be poorly formed, or at least biased toward Chalmers’ own property dualist proposal. But it highlights a real dilemma concerning the relation between third-person functional or causal description and first-person experience. Complicated brain mechanisms may help explain certain behaviors, visual processing, self-modeling, and various other isolated functions. But explaining why mechanisms that theoretically work perfectly well on their own are also associated with emotion, will, thought, and the disciplined logical reflection of scientists themselves is another matter entirely. Consciousness has had nothing like the mythical “urea moment,” and it is hard to imagine what that would even look like.

…

The combination problem is more serious. Constitutive panpsychism is often criticized for being unable to explain how the experiences of fundamental physical entities such as quarks and photons combine to yield the familiar sort of human consciousness we know and love. I think this objection has force against substance-property variants of panpsychism. If we begin with little bits of matter, each carrying its own little intrinsic mental property, then it is genuinely mysterious how these bits sum into a single subject. Of course, quarks and photons are not little bits of stuff but something more like vibratory excitations in a field. Even the latter image is but a metaphor trying to get at what the equations mean.

Whitehead does not begin with simply located bits of matter. He begins with events, occasions, processes, or acts of becoming. Many contemporary philosophers of mind still work with an outdated pre-quantum understanding of matter, something like Descartes’ res extensa. But we know the fundamental “particles” studied by physicists are not little lumps of stuff fully present at an instant. They are vibratory patterns of activity so intimately entangled that, as Whitehead put it, “any local agitation shakes the whole universe.” Every atom is fused into its environment. There is no detached, self-contained local existence.

Rather than struggling to understand how abstract little bits of extended matter with mental intrinsic properties might combine to form bigger bits of minded matter, Whitehead begins with a more concrete conception of energetic activity that is more easily analogized to agitations of experience. Neither matter nor mind is composed of simply located bits or isolated states. Both energy and experience are activities with fuzzy boundaries. Experiences, like energy vectors, are intrinsically process-relational: they manifest in a specious present as a tension between the actualized facts of an inherited past and the potential forms of an anticipated future.

Whitehead’s answer to the combination problem is “concrescence.” Here’s a crash course [should be timestamped to start about 1 minute in]:

Concrescence is not aggregation. It is the production of novel togetherness. It is the growing together of many prehensions or feelings of perished facts of experience into a new subjective actuality in the present, which itself perishes in turn to become a new objective fact available for future concrescences. The many become one, and are increased by one. The creation of each new actuality is a social effort employing the whole universe. And yet each new occasion of experience is also self-creating, an individual recapitulation of the universe, contributing its novel perspective back to the buzzing democracy of fellow creatures. Whitehead’s way of dissolving the combination problem was already nascent in William James’ original statement of it in Principles of Psychology. Whitehead’s account of the process of concrescence, whereby the many become one and are increased by one, directly builds on James’ suggestive phrasing of a “101st feeling,” a “totally new fact,” that brings together the
100 original feelings that signal its creation (James 1890, 160). Whitehead’s reframing of the metaphysical arena allows us to move beyond the false problem of having to combine spatially isolated substances to instead analyze the concrescence of temporally resonant events.

Cosmopsychism faces the inverse problem: the decombination problem. If the universe as a whole is one mega-subject, how do finite centers of experience split off from it? How does the cosmic mind become my mind, your mind, the mind of a bat, the dim sentience of a cell? Again, as you may have guessed, Whitehead reframes the issue. The ongoing composition of the cosmos is achieved neither through the summation of tiny parts nor through subtraction from some larger whole. It is achieved by a dipolar relational process with both a stability-providing physical pole and a novelty-inducing mental pole.

Whitehead is neither a micropsychist nor a cosmopsychist exclusively. He tries to have it both ways. There is a universal soul, a psyche of the cosmos, a primordial actuality or God of this world; and there are countless creatures creating in concert with it. The creativity of cosmogenesis transcends both God and finite actualities. It is the source of all co-evolving parts, wholes, bodies, and souls. Whitehead’s account of process includes moments of combination and decombination, conjunction and disjunction. The combination and decombination problems are transformed into the logic of concrescence, becoming features and not bugs: a way of thinking change as more than the rearrangement of pre-existing parts or the fragmentation of a pre-existing whole, but as genuine becoming, emergent evolution, creative advance.

…

Concrescence also answers the charge of epiphenomenalism. In Whitehead’s view, feeling is not a powerless glow emitted by neural machinery. Feeling is the very tissue of causal inheritance. The actual world is bound together in a nexus of physical feelings. Physical causation is already a primitive form of feeling: the reception of the past into the present. Mentality, in its higher-grade forms, is not a violation of physics but a diversion and intensification of energetic flow, an opening of possibility within inherited constraints, a shift in probabilities across scales of organization rather than a wrench thrown in supposedly deterministic physical gears. Consciousness does not hover above causal processes. It is a late, complex, evolutionarily intensified form of causal process becoming inwardly luminous to itself.

As for Dennett-style illusionism: the appeal to illusion does not eliminate experience. It presupposes it. If consciousness is an illusion, there is still something it is like to undergo the illusion. Calling experience a narrative construction, controlled hallucination, or self-model does not explain why there is any felt immediacy to delude us. A model that is experienced as a world is already more than a model in the merely formal sense. It is a lived world. The question is not whether introspection is fallible. Obviously it is. The question is whether fallibility about the contents of experience licenses denial of experience as such. It does not.

I’ve had a long conversation with the illustionist Keith Frankish. It revealed that illusionism and panexperientialism are closer than they may at first appear, at least to the extent that we both reject the poorly formed concept of “qualia.”

The tl;dr is that “qualia” renders experience in terms of substance-property ontology, where quales are the “intrinsic properties” championed by Russellian panpsychists. Whitehead’s process-relational account of experience frees it from the prison house of substance ontology. Experience is a relational process, not an intrinsic property sequestered inside material substances.

I agree that the hard problem is often framed badly. I agree that we should resist mysterianism. I agree that neuroscience has a ton to teach us. But the physicalist’s treatment of the status of consciousness usually depends on an equivocation. It describes the neural and functional correlates of phenomenology and then quickly declares that nothing remains to be explained. But correlation, functional mapping, and mechanistic description do not by themselves tell us anything about consciousness. In fact, they presuppose it.

Whitehead’s alternative is not anti-scientific. It is a protest against bad metaphysics masquerading as science. It asks us to bring natural science to its senses by refusing to split the world in two. We cannot describe a universe of blind particles and then, as an afterthought, say “oh, by the way, there is experience.” Nor can we describe a universe made of mathematical equations and then pretend that the physicists who value truth, beauty, evidence, and explanation are somehow external to the picture. A coherent cosmology needs to account not only for the laws of physics but for the physicists capable of knowing them.

The real issue is not whether consciousness is something additional to the laws of physics. That framing already grants physicalism its fallacious misplaced concreteness. The issue is whether the laws of physics were ever merely physical in the sense required by reductive materialism. Whitehead’s answer is no. Nature is full-blooded. Real facts are happening. Feelings are among the facts. Indeed, feeling is the only medium through which facts can come to matter.

At one point in my dialogue above with Pedro and SocraticSwansongs (Jack), I threw out one of the most quotable lines of Plato’s Timaeus, that “time is a moving image of eternity.” I’m grateful to my fellow friend of wisdom, Timothy Jackson, for playing the Socratic gadfly to my Platonic homage! The phrase no doubt can and has been read as a defense of two-world hierarchical metaphysics of exactly the type both Tim and I want to destroy. What follows are some reflections largely inspired by my offline dialogues with Tim. After my last post, On Genesis, I felt a bit concerned that I might have unfairly characterized his variation-first proposal, which I deeply respect and will likely never be done tarrying with! So let me just say, do not take my word for his work, go read his stuff directly! And by all means do not take my attempts to articulate an alternative view as the final say!

Here, I want to briefly revisit my long dialogue with Tim about Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. We’ve discussed it many times before, including in the context of the young Schelling’s rather generative reading:

Timaeus is not a treatise. It is a dialogue, not a doctrine; a dramatic pedagogical performance intended to demonstrate the impossibility of any final theory, not a metaphysical system demonstrating the remainderless rule of Form over flux. The cosmogony on offer in Timaeus is explicitly only a likely story.

Tim is absolutely right that quoting the “moving image of eternity” line without proper interpretation risks letting the whole weight of the reception history of later Platonisms steal the show: eternal form as what’s real, temporal bodies as derivative corruptions, becoming as illusory imagery rather than the way value actualizes. The phrase can indeed conjure traumatic memories of the millennia long metaphysical disaster of preformationism, where all formation is eternally pre-given, the whole world-process reduced to a dim procession of bad knockoffs. There are plenty of versions of Platonism where the khôra is not celebrated but subordinated as the enemy of order, tolerated, but only insofar as nous succeeds in disciplining it. Tim admits he loves the Timaeus. But his love is critical, and he wants mine to be, too!

He’s absolutely right that “moving image of eternity” swallowed without the gloss I’d want to give it sounds like it contradicts a philosophy of creative process. Eternity as a pre-given inventory of forms turns time into just a distorted display of a hidden timeless truth.

But I do not think the dialogue should be allowed to be reduced to that reception. I read the line otherwise, as implying the self-movement of images, that the “apparent” world is in fact self-moving or ensouled, and that the eternal nous would itself remain but static noise, like a TV with no signal, without the life and motion granted it by the wandering khôra, and without the wonder it inspires in an otherwise sleepy mind that thinks it already knows it all. Nous only becomes conscious because disturbed by the metaxic motion of the khôric imagination.

Plato’s texts are as pluripotent as it gets. The Timaeus seeds both the later theories of preformation and epigenesis without itself settling into either as a positive theory. Preformation is there, obviously: the demiurge looking to an eternal model to craft the cosmos as an image of intelligible order. But epigenesis is there too, right at the khôra of the text, if you will: wandering winnower, receptacle, wet-nurse of becoming, generative matrix, the unruly condition without which order would have no place in which to be born.

Tim grants the epigenetic thesis is present, but thinks its blooming is made to sputter and gets shut down by demiurgic decree. The khôra is the best part of the text, but in his view, not the core. The governing principle remains preformationist, and that is what gets carried forward in Plato’s legacy. I can’t entirely disagree with Tim’s sense of the dangers of the dominant legacy; but I will continue to defend a minority reading of Plato, which I do not need to invent since it is just as ancient as the dominant line.

Plato invites multiple readings. His dialogues are part schoolroom, part theater, part mythopoetic ritual and spiritual exercise. Timaeus the astronomer has to begin his account again and again and again. He is forced to continually qualifying himself. He offers not a world-building algorithm but the best story a mortal can tell if they, perhaps foolishly, try to speak of the All. The form the dialogue performs is not an eternal theory to rule them all, but a lesson in the impossibility of final theories.

In my view, the dialogue stages the tension between preformation and epigenesis prior to their later stabilization as opposing theories. It lets us feel the temptation of both. The archetypal rationalist wants a final account of form, order, intelligibility, measure, a cosmos rather than a disorderly flux. The radical empiricist wants a good enough account that leaves room for birth, novelty, life, imagination, embodiment, and evolution, and knows that doing justice to these processes of actualization begins with granting the “dark and difficult” excessiveness of the khôric matrix its own irreducibly strange dignity. The khôra is not dead matter awaiting masculine form but a mythic name for the potent pulse that puts the go in cosmogony.

Plato is one of my ancestors. That does not mean I just believe him. That would be impossible, since despite all his writing, he left us with dialogues, not with doctrines to believe. The dialogues not only propose but also destroy all the supposed doctrines that get called “Platonic.” I inherit not just the spirit of Plato, but the body! Which is to say, I wrestle with him. I let him stress test my own intuitions. I flatly reject any one who defends Platonism as a metaphysical police-state of eternal forms. That would be to ignore the irony-drenched dramatic pedagogy of the dialogues.

Timaeus is asking us to inhabit the tension between intelligence and genesis without prematurely resolving it.

Tim is right that, despite his warnings about writing, Plato wrote. A lot. And writing canalizes. He knew he was creating a legacy. We also know from his 7th letter that his real teachings were not and could not be written. Still, unlike Socrates and Jesus, who wrote nothing, Plato is more responsible for his legacy. His dialogues are not innocent. They helped make “Platonism” possible, and Platonism has often besmirched its patron. To the extent that he left us with “plans,” whether for ideal cities or ordered worlds, what we actually have are lesson plans. His dialogues are a school for the dialectical generation and reformation of ideas, not a systematic program awaiting deployment.

So maybe our task is to continue to read the Timaeus as an ancestral wound that still teaches us the limits of speculative philosophy. Preformationism may be no more than nous’ khôric wet dream. The demiurge must wake up, realize night has passed and day dawns, that time is thus as real as it gets. The work of realization has never been a one man show, with the author always hidden behind the curtain of appearances. We can still affirm that form is real, but that form could only ever be the folds of the curtain itself. This is what it would mean to draw the epigenetic khôra forward as the true lesson of Plato’s cosmogony.

The central issue is not simply whether Hegel is right, or whether we can derive a more empirically grounded metaphysics than absolute idealism from Darwin’s humble hypothesis of descent with variation. I agree with Charles Taylor that Hegel’s treatment of historical evolution is “disastrous.” By my lights what we are in urgent need of today is the healthy progeny of a happy marriage between the best of absolute idealism and radical empiricism. The crux is whether reality is finally intelligible as a self-enclosed rational substance, or whether every approximation to closure is an aesthetic achievement constructed within a wider, plural, unruly process of genesis that no system can finally contain.

My friend the evolutionary biologist and philosopher of ontogenesis, , is on a mission to amplify the excessiveness of the genesis story. He prefers the term “variation” because it anchors the speculative problem of excessive indeterminacy to the concrete transformation of modeling techniques wrought by the rise of the historical sciences, especially evolutionary biology. Variation is not just a local principle inside Darwinian theory but is a generic, generative operation that any rational reconstruction of an object’s origins must presuppose but can never fully recuperate. Whenever we undertake the task of reconstructing the emergence of some objective product, the indivisible triad of variation, selection, and inheritance will arise together with complex circularity (ie, the first already presupposing the last). But this is because in such cases we are already looking backward from a particular constructed product. On the other hand, when we consider genesis in general, variation has ordinal priority. Its firstness is what prevents genesis from ever becoming arrested in some final completed crystal at the end of time.

Reading the early work (2015, 2016) of Montévil and Mossio (with Pocheville and Longo) has given me an opportunity to sharpen the theoretical edges of the concepts of variation and closure. They argue that variation should be treated not as an accidental disturbance of biological order but as a principle of biology just as fundamental as the principle of organizational closure. Organisms are not “generic” objects, like the idealized masses of mechanics or the charged particles of electromagnetic theory. Electrons are all interchangeable from the standpoint of Maxwell’s equations. Organisms, they argue, are “specific” objects, meaning they are historically individuated beings whose phase spaces are unprestatable, who each to varying degrees qualitatively differs from others and even from themselves across development, and whose functional transformations of constraints may alter the very terms by which their organization has been defined. Biology is not just a more complicated physics. They are in a sense defining biology as a science in which the exception can, within limits, be lawfully modeled, without ceasing to be exceptional.

But I still wonder if what seems exceptional about living organisms relative to mechanistic physics may turn out to be genetically and generically prior to the ahistorical models of physics.

Because I’ve been teaching Hegel this semester, I’ve often found myself trying to steel man his system against Tim’s criticisms of his widely alleged tendency toward theoretical closure. My ironic defense of Hegel is not a result of some sort of conversion experience to Absolute Idealism. Rather, I’m convinced my steel man will help temper the alternative ontogenetic approach Tim and I have been hammering away at for several years now. Also, it turns out Hegel is not as easy to dismiss as some caricatures of his thought suggest. Still, for now, I remain a process-relational philosopher inspired by Whitehead’s organic realism, which I believe provides a way to affirm the important truths won by both Hegel and Darwin.

The crux of the argument, as I see it, is not between a Supreme Reason that pre-determines everything and a corrosive irrationality that annihilates meaning at its roots. It is between differing ways of rendering Reason’s relation to its outside. Does Reason already contain its own outside as a moment of its self-development? Or does Reason itself evolve out of an ancient lineage of creatively varying evaluative and recollective feelings whose enabling conditions it can illuminate but never exhaust?

Hegel’s circle of circles that almost closes

Hegel would no doubt object that variation, as Tim has sought to (un)define it, cannot be treated as an immediately given minimal condition or ontological primitive. The minimalist definition of “differing-from” is already a determination, since it contains many other concepts including relation, negation, otherness, and contrast. Variation cannot simply be first, because to vary is to differ from something, even if that something is not yet an object in any stable sense. Variation already differs from alternative operations, such as identification or repetition. In Hegel’s Logic, being and nothing do not sit side by side like two objects. They are inherently unstable and instantly vanish into one another. Becoming is the unrest of their vanishing. So if one says, “There is an indeterminate no-thing whose only character is the operation of variation,” Hegel would likely reply: yes, but you have just rediscovered, in another idiom, the instability of pure immediacy. You have not reached a pre-rational primitive so much as the beginning of logic, the self-undermining of the indeterminate, the first operation of mediation. The moment one says “variation is,” one has already stepped beyond sheer immediacy into Hegel’s “diamond net” of determinate negation.

Annoyingly, then, Hegel would argue with good reason that variation is not prior to determination but an essential moment within it. The Logic continues from becoming to determinate being; only then is there “something,” which by way of further negation reveals its “other.” Hegel is not beginning with Something, Nothing, Subjectivity, or Identity in any determinate sense. He’s beginning by demonstrating the impossibility of any beginning that does not already imply its end. Grammar cannot be escaped, since any critique of grammar must still be grammatically conveyed, and any real translation between alternative grammars would already be a transformation of both. Even more annoyingly, Tim’s affirmation that variation has no determinate content and is no-thing reads for Hegel like a self-undermining reductio ad absurdum, a slide into abject nonsense.

This is why I sometimes say only a confident silence slays Hegel’s dialectical dragon. He can only catch you if you open your mouth to utter a proposition. In fact, even just pointing gets your finger trapped. The Zen master may throw the stick down on his shoulder, blink unknowingly, or burst into laughter. Hegel cannot refute silence with an argument, because silence does not enter the courtroom of the Concept, and so cannot be sentenced. Mediation has no jurisdiction over the unsaid, which is less than nothing. Only once the Zen master offers a dharma talk on the superiority of silence does the Logic snare its prey. Hegel’s diamond net is not external to discourse. It is discourse discovering that it cannot help but mediate itself even and especially when it seeks to honor the dignity of immediacy with words.

Still, I am sympathetic to Tim’s resistance. The perniciousness of Hegel’s logical judo flip is that he (mis)appropriates negation—the failure of a finite concept to close upon itself—by turning it into the Concept’s final triumphant trump card. Every outside is assimilated into another inside. Any apparent remainder becomes another moment in the system, another crumb to be digested by the system’s infinite appetite for difference. That the wound of Reason has so far remained self-healing becomes eternal proof of the logical organism’s wholeness. Hegel becomes the supreme rationalizer: he turns the self-conscious limits of finite understanding into just another chapter in Reason’s absolute system of knowing.

Hegel is a thinker of dusk. The owl of Minerva flies only when a form of life has grown old. He is unsurpassed at reconstructing the meaning of a world once the dust has settled. But does the dust ever really settle? Can we ever arrive at The End? Or are we always on our way, forever kicking up a cloud of yet unthought possibilities? The brilliance of Hegel’s retrospective reconstruction tempts us to identify retrospective intelligibility with the forever futural and so incomplete wholeness/holiness of reality. The future is explicitly left unthought by Hegel, and yet the system often behaves as if no future could surprise it.

James Bradley’s reading of Whitehead as a transcendental cosmologist (1993) may be helpful here. The difficulty is not merely that Hegel closes the circle too soon, while Darwin or Whitehead leaves it open. The difficulty is how any philosophy of creative process or ontogenesis can affirm its own generic categoreal truth—that reality is composed of unique, once-occurrent events—if the real is ipso facto not grounded in eternal universal form. Whitehead states the problem with disarming honesty in Modes of Thought:

“From this doctrine (of forms of process), a difficult problem arises. How can we justify the notion of some general value of reasoning? Indeed, if the process depends on individuals, it varies according to the differences of individuals. Consequently, what has been said of one process cannot be said of another process. The same difficulty is encountered concerning the notion of the identity of an individual conceived as implicated in different processes. Our doctrine seems to have destroyed the very foundation of rationality” (MT 133).

The question is whether Reason survives after universality has been dethroned by creative variation or Deleuzean difference-in-itself. Hegel answers by pre-authorizing the Concept to recollect every difference into itself. Whitehead answers differently by resurrecting an analogical, experimental, and revisable method of reasoning, Reason as a disciplined relator of forms of process rather than a sovereign survey from nowhere.

Whitehead’s creative incompleteness

Whitehead is far more sympathetic to the variational impulse than Hegel. For Whitehead, the final real things are not substances enduring through accidental modifications, but relational acts of becoming, actual occasions arising and perishing within the wider, wilder operation of infinite modification he terms Creativity. Yet Whitehead is not satisfied with a spare metaphysics of bare variation. For him, any concrete creation—any creative act—inevitably requires the co-operation of valuation and memorization. Objectification, for Whitehead, is not merely the epistemic act of identifying or postulating invariants. Perished actual entities transition from subjects into “immortal objects” available as “real potentials” for later actualities. “Eternal objects” ingress into a concrescing occasion as adjacent alternatives relative but not reducible to that occasion’s inherited past and present standpoint. Another aspect of their relevance stems from their everlasting value as immediately envisaged by the primordial nature of God. Eternal and immortal objects function causally in actualities as data, as real potentialities with abstractly definable and physically determinable functions. But neither type of invariance, immortals nor eternals, is made up by us. If anything, it is rather we who are partially made out of them, in that they constitute our physical habits and characterize our enduring identity. Note that Whitehead distinguishes his eternal objects from classical “universals,” which is important since it is easy to misunderstand their role if they are collapsed into the latter. Whitehead:

“The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete par­ticular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way.’ The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?” (PR 20)

Real potentials are that which allows us to recognize variation not just as an epistemic condition of evolutionary thinking but as an ontogenetic operation of actual becoming. Actual occasions are the final realities, but it is only by reference to eternals and in response to immortals that their creative variations occur.

Some objects are just epistemic abstractions, of course, and misplaced concreteness remains the great sin of human consciousness. But the objectification of entities, whether immortal or eternal, is not merely stipulative. It is how causal transmission works, each natural event always and everywhere involving the holy trinity of variation, valuation, and memorization. Evolution requires objects because evolution requires valuation and memorization. Neither the anamnesis of an original past nor the so-called Platonic heaven of Ideas is invented by some crime of conceptual reification. Valuation and memorization are (in their reformed Whiteheadian versions intended to be) felt ingredients in experience, a form in the flux, just as elemental as anything—or non-thing—else, including variation or creativity. In this sense, creativity might be understood not as mere variation stripped of secondness and thirdness, but as variation inseparable from valuation and memorization (or eternality and immortality).

Whitehead’s God, then, should not be conceived as a substance standing apart from eternal objects on one side and the concrescence of finite occasions on the other. God is not an external designer or sovereign engineer who miraculously intervenes by stamping His final forms on a dead world otherwise left to its own devices. Instead, divine agency is actualized only in and through actual occasions. God’s primordial nature is the ordering of eternal objects as relevant possibilities for finite becomings, but we must not imagine this as a finite set of eternal objects stored in an industrial-size Platonic freezer. The eternal objects are non-entities without God’s primordial conception and consequent reception of their ingression into temporal creatures. God’s consequent nature is not an afterthought added to an otherwise complete creation but the divine recollection of the world’s proliferation, the preservation and integration of finite satisfactions into an ever-widening, ever-diversifying harmony of harmonies. There is nowhere else for the superjective satisfaction of actual occasions to go, once they have perished as subjects, but into the consequent life of God. And conversely, there is nowhere else for God to be actual except in the initiation, lure, suffering, and fulfillment of finite occasions. God is ingredient in the world as the intensifying lure toward relevant novelty, and the world is ingredient in God as the achieved fact of creative advance. The God-world co-creative mutuality is not an external relation between two substances, but a dipolar process wherein divine and worldly becoming require one another. God gives the world possibilities to value without predetermining their actualization; the world gives God actualities to suffer with without exhausting divine possibility. The relation is not unilateral creatio ex nihilo, but mutual immanence: God as the primordial ordering of all potentiality and consequent feeling of every actuality, the world as the evolutionary adventure through which those potentials are proposed, tested, intensified, sometimes comically distorted and always tragically redeemed.

Whitehead’s God may be made otherwise intelligible as a cosmological transposition of the relation between variation and organization in theoretical biology. Creativity is metaphysically ultimate: the many become one and are increased by one. God is not ultimate in that same sense. God is the primordial ordering of relevance within Creativity, the valuation of pure potentials by which novelty may be more than arbitrary eruption. Thus God is metaphysically accidental relative to Creativity, but categorically indispensable if we hope to offer a rational account of the organization our cosmic epoch. God is not an exception to creative process but the primordial lure of process toward the intensification of contrasts.

But this divine ordering should not be treated as a completed closure. Whitehead’s God is dipolar. The primordial nature inspires intensity of experience by providing relevant novelty; the consequent nature receives, suffers, preserves, and reweaves actuality. God is not the finished totality of the universe but the growing memory of its incompletion in process of production. The consequent nature is raucous jazz ensemble, not an archive of dead facts. Whitehead:

“There is not one completed set of things which are actual occasions. For the fundamental inescapable fact is the creativity in virtue of which there can be no ‘many things’ which are not subordinated in a concrete unity. Thus a set of all actual occasions is by the nature of things a standpoint for another concrescence which elicits a concrete unity from those many actual occasions. Thus we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed completion.” (PR 211)

Darwin and historical science

Darwin changes the philosophical situation not by offering a metaphysical system but by forcing thought to take genesis seriously. Historical science asks not merely what a thing is, but how it came to be. The question of genesis dissolves static essences. All enduring essences are understood to be constructions. Species are no longer eternal kinds imperfectly realized by individuals. They are relatively stable achievements of formation within ongoing and often hybrid lineages. Forms are made, inherited, shared, adjusted, lost, and transformed.

Darwin’s importance is not exhausted by natural selection. Darwin’s hypothesis marks a threshold in the emergence of historical reasoning. Geology, embryology, population statistics, comparative anatomy, evolutionary biology—all of these transformed our onto-epistemic situation. They disclosed that any biological objects and laws we attempt to classify are products of histories. Our classifications are themselves historically situated abstractions.

Evolutionary science reveal that no achieved form contains the sufficient reason for its own historical genesis. Every organism looks inevitable once it exists. A trait looks functional once a niche has selected it. But the actual genesis is far messier and full of unpredictable contingencies.

Randomness never means absolute chaos. Random means unprestatable relative to a theoretical framework. It denotes an indivisible remainder in causal reconstruction. Variation is always adjacent to a history. There has never been a now without a past. Every mutation, preference, and divergence from a norm occurs in a field already heavy with inheritance. It is not that evolution is blind chance but that its novelty cannot be exhaustively deduced from what came before.

History does make sense in retrospect; otherwise no historical science would be possible. But the retrospective sense of history must not be confused with the predictive possession of the future. Evolution teaches us that the past is ingredient in the present, and that the present shapes the future, but it also teaches us that the future is not contained in the present as a concept waiting to be deduced.

Theoretical biology: variation and closure

Montévil and Mossio’s account of biological organization helps sharpen this point. The theoretical objects of physics are usually generic. The apple, the anvil, and the asteroid can all be treated as the same sort of thing insofar as they obey the same equations under the relevant idealizations. Their historical individuation and context are bracketed, since all that matters is how invariant symmetries in their behavior unfold in a pre-given mathematical space. In biology, by contrast, because the objects of study are historical, their transformations are not merely changes of state within a fixed phase space. Development and evolution change the relevant space of description. Organisms do not simply move within fixed trajectories governed by the symmetries of invariant constraints; they vary their own constraints, redrawing the closure diagrams that would otherwise determine their trajectories.

Variation cannot be reduced to noise haloing invariant structures. A biological variation may be functional: it may change a constraint, rearrange the relation among constraints, or bring a new constraint into organizational closure. An organism persists not by remaining the same object under the same symmetries but by passing from one regime of closure to another. Its identity is not the conservation of a substance or essence but the continuity of a precariously self-maintaining adventure. The organism is a melody that survives by modulating to resonate with its environment, not a stone that persists by resisting alteration.

The companion concept to variation is constraint closure or organization. Montévil and Mossio distinguish “processes,” the ongoing thermodynamic flows of matter and energy, from “constraints,” the relatively conserved forms that channel those flows at relevant time scales. In organisms, constraints do not simply sit outside the processes they constrain, like an inclined plane guiding a ball. They depend upon other constrained processes for their own maintenance. Closure is the term for the mutual dependence whereby constraints maintain processes that maintain constraints. Biological self-determination is self-constraint, but self-constraint without isolation. Thermodynamic openness and organizational closure are not opposed concepts. On the organizational account, they are the left and right hands with which life continually remakes itself.

Their framework is an attempt to give biology a principle of stability or defining characteristic without betraying variation. Closure is not the conservation of a fixed set of invariant components nor even fixed constraints. It is the persistence of organizational mutuality through the alteration, loss, and acquisition of new constraints.

Montévil and Mossio are offering an epistemology of biology or theoretical framework for modeling organisms. They mark the living being as a distinctive kind of scientific object. At least in this earlier work, they had not taken the speculative step of asking whether the supposedly ahistorical generic objects of physics are themselves abstractions from a deeper historical and organismic flux. Their framework lets biology escape reduction to physics by showing that biological symmetries are local, contingent, and historically unstable. Whitehead wants to press further by arguing the invariant symmetries of physical models are not metaphysical ultimates, either. Perhaps they are the most generic social habits shaping our cosmic epoch, enormously stable relative to cellular life, but still achievements of evolutionary becoming rather than eternal laws standing outside history.

This is the sense in which biology should teach us a new physics. The point is not that physics should abandon mathematical idealization. The point is that we should not forget when we are working with idealizations. Physics has earned its tremendous theoretical power by modeling many phenomena as if they were ahistorical. Whitehead warns that the success of this method has seduced us into mistaking a method for an ontology. From the standpoint of a speculative biology enlarged into an organic cosmology, the law-like regularities physics discovers are better understood as widespread habits, stabilized routes of inheritance, enduring societies, patterns of process that have achieved such depth of repetition that they appear almost eternal to us. Biology does not suddenly add history to an otherwise timeless nature. Biology makes nature’s historicity visible because it amplifies the variational novelty that otherwise easily remains hidden within the extreme repetitiveness of most physical processes.

Variation, selection, inheritance—creativity, valuation, memorization

The biological triad of variation, selection, and inheritance can be mapped onto Peircean Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, and also onto Whiteheadian creativity, valuation, and memorization. Tim wants to preserve the ordinal priority of the operation of variation. I want to insist that the triad is concrete only in co-operation. There is never selection without inheritance, and never inheritance without some prior selection. Of course, selection cannot select without a distribution of variants, and inheritance would have no function if nothing changed.

If we are speaking methodologically, the ordinality is indispensable. For Tim, variation precedes selection in the logic of Darwinian explanation. There must be a distribution of differences before selection can act. But if we are speaking cosmologically, the order of the terms cannot be pried apart so neatly. A distribution of differences can only array themselves in relation to the horizon of relevance opened by the norms and aims of an organism. A variant is not merely sheer difference. To be a variant is to be a variant within a continuum of relevant alternatives. Difference must make a difference to someone. The contrast must be available for some mode of prehensive feeling, even if not yet conscious, cognitive, or deliberate.

Valuation in the Whiteheadian triad does not mean conscious deliberative judgment. There is not a little rational agent hidden inside the frog, the gecko, the cell, or the ribosome making choices. It is not a conscious judgment but an aesthetic and affective selectivity, such that an individuating entity or entitative process is never merely there for others as this or that objective chemical or physiological event, but also subjectively orienting around its own here. In Whiteheadian terms, every actual occasion is an act of prehension, of minimal perceptivity, with subjective form and subjective aim. It feels its world, inherits data, selects, excludes, integrates, and produces novelty. Grasping this requires overcoming the simplistic binary between rational agency and dead mechanism. Reality is made primarily neither of dead stuff nor tiny egos but of energetic pulses of emotion.

The objective and subjective sides intertwine without collapsing into one another. A point mutation in the nucleotide sequence may alter a pheromone. An organism may prefer the new smell. Chemical divergence and erotic preference are both characteristics in an unbroken evental nexus of actual occasions. A molecular change cannot become evolutionarily significant until and unless it is caught up in a field of attraction, recognition, or rejection. The pheromone is law-abiding molecule. It may also be an outlaw instigating a new ecology of desire.

I would not want to make subjectivity co-ultimate with creativity in a crude way, as some panpsychisms appear to do. Tim is right to resist any account that takes a derived category—subject, mind, language, matter—and elevates it into a sacred name for the whole. But I do think William James’s “pure experience,” and Whitehead’s related account of experience as the most general form of “togetherness,” point toward a vital field of relationality prior to any settled split between subject and object, mind and body. Variation is happening on both sides of any such apparent division. The internal/external distinction is itself a product of creative process. The more original situation is not a mind looking out at a world, but an event of becoming in which feeler and felt, activity and datum, aim and object, have not yet been cleanly cleaved but are grown together.

Whitehead: creativity without external design

Whitehead gives me a way to disagree with Hegel without merely reversing or ignoring him. He does not begin with substance, subject, matter, mind, or even God. His ultimate is Creativity. Creativity is not an entity. Nor is it a creator. It is the ultimate categoreal operation by which the many become one and are increased by one. Actual occasions are the final realities, and eternal objects are potentials for the characterization of actualities. Both are simultaneously conditioned by and conditions of Creativity.

Creativity is not mere under-determination or blind flux. It is the production of determinate actuality from inherited potentiality, the advance into novelty through concrescence. Actual occasions are not objects awaiting classification or categorization within an Encyclopedic system. They are unique acts of becoming, the each-form perpetually bursting beyond whatever All-form may yet have been imagined, compelling our Pluriverse to die and become again and again through each microcosmic recapitulation. Each occasion inherits a past, feels its possibilities, decides among alternatives, achieves satisfaction, and then perishes into objective immortality for future occasions.

This account is intended to avoid two equally bad options. On the one hand, we need not accept Hegel’s tendency to turn every remainder into more food to be metabolized in service of conceptual self-closure. On the other hand, we need not treat the remainder as some sort of absurd excess that makes all attempts at rationality a farce. The extra-rational is not the anti-rational. It is the aesthetic matrix out of which Reason grows. Conscious cognition is not the whole of reality; rational thought is special mode of intensified contrast available in the late phases of rare actual occasions, granting them the ability to illuminate earlier phases of their own concrescence.

This is also why I cannot bring myself to affirm variation as primary, as if separable from valuation and memorization. Creativity does not first vary, then later acquire value, then later acquire memory. In finite actualities, aim, habit, and novelty are distinguishable only as abstractions from a concrete act of becoming. There is no naked novelty, because novelty is always relative to the perspective of some occasion’s actual world. There is no blind inheritance, because inheritance is always selective. There is no vacuous valuation, because aims can only work with inherited data and alternative possibilities.

God is not the creator of Creativity. Nor is God a supernatural machinist responsible for designing biological machinery. God is the lure of relevance, the envisagement of possibility, the operation whereby eternal objects ingress into finite actualities without dictating the way beings become. Variation turns out never to have been blind, but this does not mean that a cosmic engineer had a blueprint. It means that becoming is intrinsically aesthetic, its beginnings intrinsically allured by ends.

God is organization writ large, closure cosmologized, but not as an organizational closure finally achieved. God is the both the ideal of intensified varieties of organization, and the tenderness by which the perpetual failure of closure contributes to the evolutionary realization of tragic beauty rather than meaningless waste.

Meyer and the temptation to complete the machine

In my conversation with the intelligent design theorist Stephen Meyer last week, he admitted that organisms are not adequately understood as machines. He recognized, at least in that moment, that the machine metaphor breaks down when confronted with the reality of the community of causes operative in living organization. Cells are not artifacts like clocks or computers, assembled partes extra partes. Organisms contain machine-like constraints on processes, yes; and organisms can produce machines. But organisms are not themselves machines.

The problem is that Meyer responds to the computational incompleteness of mechanism by positing a divine engineer outside the machine. He seeks a transcendent source of completion in an intelligent designer. An epistemic limit is repurposed as an opportunity for apologetics. In other words, God of the gaps.

But what if computational incompleteness is not a software bug in need of a deus ex machina pseudo-explanation but a constitutive feature of life itself? The success of effective theorization within bounded domains does not authorize us to project closure in some totalizing way. Reductive physicalism makes that mistake when it turns local idealizations of closed systems into an absolute causal reduction base. Intelligent design makes an equal and opposite mistake by patching local mechanistic failure by appeal to a transcendent demiurge.

The process theological response is different from both reductionism and creationism (to call a spade a spade). As with Hegel’s treatment of the true infinite, the truly transcendent is not separable from immanence but rather its superlative mode. A false transcendence stands over against the world as an external beyond, just as Hegel’s bad infinite stretches endlessly past the finite without ever overcoming its opposition to it. Genuine transcendence is not an escape to elsewhere. It is the finite’s own self-surpassing, the immanent process by which actuality exceeds itself from within. God is not outside the world-process as an alien cause imposed upon becoming, but is each worldly creature’s immanent lure toward intensity of experience. Divine transcendence does not take flight from finite occasions of experience but is the inexhaustible depth of possibility ingredient in each concrescence, and the consequent gathering up of their perished achievements into a more inclusive life. I relate to immanence and transcendence as the inhalation and exhalation of metaphysical discussion.

This is why process theology is so different from intelligent design. It does not infer God from gaps in the gears. It contests the metaphysical adequacy of mechanism from the start. Organisms are not flawed machines requiring an external engineer to wind their springs. Organism is the more concrete category, and machine is a derivative abstraction.

A machine has constraints imposed from without or assembled according to a design that remains external to its material functioning. An organism, by contrast, continually produces, repairs, and transforms the constraints that make its own processes possible. Its parts are not merely accidentally arranged but are bound into relations of mutual maintenance. This is why the machine metaphor misleads even when it is locally useful. It extracts one aspect of organismic life, constrained work, and forgets the open-ended circular genesis of the constraints themselves. Intelligent design mistakes an abstraction for the whole and concludes that an external intelligence must supply what the abstraction omitted.

An organic evolutionary theology instead begins by not omitting the reality. Life is not mechanism plus miracles. Mechanism is organism minus internal genesis. The machine is a frozen diagram of constrained process; the organism is constraint learning how to transform itself. The divine is no longer needed as a technician of last resort. God becomes the goad of the organism’s own adventure of continual self-surpassing, the depth of relevance by which variation is made viable.

Language, semiosis, and the danger of assimilation

Human language is a highly derived evolutionary phenomenon. Our specific forms of symbolic language are not plesiomorphic across lineages. If we call birdsong, whale clicks, pheromonal signaling, and photon wavelengths language, we risk taking a late human category and projecting it backward as the name of the whole.

But we don’t want to end up with the opposite extreme of imagining human language is in any sense alien in nature. There is a logos to our cosmos. Human words are a higher potentiation of semiotic processes that long precede them. The human mouth is not the first organ of meaning. Cells already mean. The world is not made of semiotically inert stuff that language later points at and bootstraps into meaning. It is relationally co-determined from the beginning, and at least since the emergence of living cells this co-determination becomes undeniably semiotic.

As Peirce argued, sign-processes are rooted in the relational structure of reality and become more explicit, recursive, and interpretive in life. In the physical world, there is relational co-determination. In the biological world, this becomes semiosis proper. In human language, semiosis becomes self-reflective, symbolic, historical, and potentially dangerously detached and self-enclosed.

Language can drive us mad. Western alphabetic abstraction can easily alienate itself from the ecologies that gave birth to it. It can mistake its own symbols for the real, putting its own false universals in place of concrete facts, destroying worlds in the process by imposing its own grammatical habits onto habitats that cannot bear them. The ecological catastrophe driven largely by the economic abstraction of purely symbolic general purpose money is Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness at a civilization ending scale.

The alternative, to my mind, is not the wholesale condemnation of universality, but the urgent construction of a concrete universality: human thought coming into the service of the community of life on Earth, recognizing its dependence upon that life and its continuity with Gaia. This is what Hegel should have meant, even if he lacked the biological and ecological knowledge to say it. A truly concrete universal would not impose the Concept upon the creative contingency of life. It would learn to speak from within life’s differentiating plurality.

Inheritance and thinking otherwise

One of the deepest practical questions is how to think otherwise than the tradition without pretending we are not products of that tradition. Western philosophy, Christianity, monotheism, substance ontology, alphabetic abstraction—these are not costumes we can slip into and out of at will. They are conventions, yes; but since we are ourselves but precariously organized bundles of conventions, we are made of what we’ve inherited.

The evolutionary insight is that novelty never comes from nowhere. It feeds on inherited materials. This is true biologically and intellectually. We cannot step outside the lineages that formed us as if to judge them innocently. But nor can we ever simply repeat some alleged pure tradition, since there never was such a purity: all lineages are hybrids. To think at all is to repeat and to differ from the materials thought with. To think and speak philosophically is to surf the gradient between habit and novelty.

Whitehead helps me keep both sides of this tension alive. He gives us a metaphysics of conservation and revolution without requiring totalizing synthesis in either direction. Every occasion inherits a world it did not make. Every occasion responds by becoming something—a new value-experience—that did not previously exist. It thereby leaves a lesser or greater mark that remakes the world. The present is neither a deduction from the past nor a miracle decreed from above.

The ecological stakes: concrete universality or collapse

The stakes are not merely academic. The danger of misplaced concreteness has become planetary. Western languages and institutions remain attached to abstract universals that float above the living Earth while commanding its dismemberment. Forests are reduced to timber, animals to inventory, cells to factories, minds to computers, communities to competitive markets. The result is ecological devastation and social psychosis.

If Hegel’s concrete universal can still be saved, it must be reinterpreted ecologically. Concrete universality cannot mean the triumph of European Reason over its others, the West over the rest. It must mean the self-recognition of human thought as a Gaian expression. Human thinking becomes concrete only when it recognizes its co-dependence upon soil, air, light, bacteria, planetary cycles, and all the other modes of more-than-human semiosis within which it arises and perishes.

Philosophy can become an organ of planetary participation. It must learn not only to rise into the kingdom of abstraction but to descend into kinship with a democracy of fellow creatures. The descendental move is not some sort of Nietzschean irrationalism. It is Reason become more adequate to its earthly conditions. It is Reason remembering that its freedom depends on lungs, skin, microbes, watersheds, and ancestors human and non-.

Evolutionary theology and intelligent design

What, then, of theology? I do not think evolutionary theory disabuses us of the need for theology, soteriology, or the religious function. Theology as traditionally practiced must accommodate itself to evolution more than the reverse. We cannot insert God into the gaps of biochemical explanation, nor can we treat cosmological fine-tuning as a divine signature. But far from abolishing the religious question, our knowledge of evolutionary history only deepens it.

Teilhard de Chardin saw this. The past is the domain of historical science, while the future is the domain of religious longing. No doubt Teilhard’s own Omega Point risks overdetermining the future. But the basic intuition remains that the future is open and we must act. We must inherit the past in light of what we hope to become. Evolutionary cosmology cannot avoid questions of value, purpose, and salvation—not because God is needed as an explanatory cause in the past, but because the future summons our agency as intelligent designers.

This is why I continue to use dangerous words like God, the Good, and salvation. I do not use them to dogmatically close inquiry. I use them as regulative ideals, as lures. They inspire scientific inquiry, constrain speculative musement, and enrich prosaic life. They help form and transform us. The danger is that the Good, parochially misshapen, can dominate goods; fundamentalist God-talk can justify the use of police force against heretics; pursuits of ultimacy can harden into authoritarian prison cells. But the answer cannot be to abandon the language of ultimacy altogether. The answer is to pluralize and de-idolize it.

I don’t mean to leave the Buddhists out with all this God-talk. Buddhism is not metaphysics but mettā-physics (Pāli for loving-kindness), a discipline of compassion and goodwill meant to cure conceptual craving and heal suffering. Nāgārjuna’s arguments do not leave us with an ultimate explanation of what is real behind appearances. He gives us instead a way of loosening our grip on every reification, including the reification of self. And yet this does not mean selves are unreal in some trivial sense. Who suffers, otherwise? The self has real effects. The doctrine of no-self is soteriological before it is theoretical.

So when I ask what evolution teaches us in relation to ultimacy, I mean: what does evolution teach us about the passion of Christ and the compassion of Buddha? How does evolution teach us to die, in the Socratic sense? How does it teach us to die better, to die meaningfully, rather than to imagine we might escape death, as if death was not an essential phase in the ever-intensifying spiral of life? Immortality as an escape is a bad form of transcendence. Real transcendence is descent into infinite relation: an acceptance of creaturely participation in a creative advance that cannot be controlled, even by God.

We are not merely here to eat, shit, and fuck, however essential and in some cases even wonderful some of those functions may be. But neither were we parachuted onto the earth from God’s repair shop preinstalled with a fixed nature. We are evolutionary creatures who ask what it is all about because asking is one of the ways evolution becomes conscious of its own incompleteness.

Experience, speculation, and the justification of thought

Whitehead says in Process and Reality that the elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought. A decade later, in Modes of Thought, he claims to be seeking evidence for that conception of the universe which justifies the details characterizing civilized phases of human society. At first this can sound like a reversal. In the earlier statement, experience justifies thought. In the later statement, speculative philosophy seems to justify our experience.

I do not think the statements conflict. They form the positive and negative poles of the magnet of philosophy. Experience justifies thought by giving it its evidence, its wounds and joys. Speculative thought justifies conscious experience only if it returns to experience with a cosmology adequate to the values by which life becomes more intense, truthful, compassionate, and beautiful. Speculation, like scientific inquiry, begins and end in experience. They do not justify experience from outside. They keep experience honest, helping us stay true to ourselves, one another, and the rest of the cosmic community.

We begin in experience. We enter into speculative musement in response to the surprise of what happens. We generate hypotheses about the conditions that make experience intelligible. Scientific inquiry tests and refines these hypotheses. The process never closes, never finishes, never achieves absolute knowledge. Categories are not imposed once and for all. They accrete historically through ongoing communal inquiry. We create them together, and they create us in turn.

Whitehead is asking after the categoreal conditions of possibility of our experience, but those conditions are not merely subjective forms imposed by a transcendental ego. They are cosmic conditions, forms of process, patterns of concrescence that make experience possible because experience is what the world is made of. His categories are therefore neither simply empirical generalizations nor eternal deductions. They are speculative lures tested by their capacity to illuminate the widest range of experience without pretending to have exhausted it.

Analogy is no longer just poetry but the disciplined way Reason travels across differences once univocal identity has been surrendered. Physics studies smaller, simpler, more repetitive organisms; biology studies larger, more historically contingent, more visibly individuated organisms; theology asks after the ultimate worth and destiny of the whole adventure. None of these domains can simply be collapsed into the others, but neither are they sealed off from one another. The speculative task is to find categoreal analogies tensile enough to reliably coordinate them and flexible enough to avoid forcing them into a single closed system.

This is the closest I come to affirming Truth: not a private possession, not a divine decree, not a final metaphysical system, but the participatory co-production of categories adequate to experience.

Truth is not a tally of votes, but neither is it the monologue of a sovereign monad. It is a shared comportment toward that which coordinates us. It is dialogical, democratic in the deepest sense, though not reducible to procedural consensus. Truth is a way of being in relation to what is most important in experience.

Experience is not mine or yours in the Cartesian sense. It is not a one-seat theater inside the skull. Experience is a mode of relation, a form of togetherness. Whitehead’s actual occasions are not substances having experiences; they are experiences becoming actual. The world is not built out of inert things later known by minds. The world is made of feelings, valuations, contrasts, and irrevocable decisions. The knowing mind emerges from the process and is not presupposed already at the beginning.

Conclusion: spiral genesis

Hegel is wrong to close the circle. Or rather, because he almost closes it and then treats that almost as absolute. Yet that he almost closes it remains significant. Without quasi-closure, there is no individual, organism, thought, language, science, or community. The circle must almost close. But it must not and cannot close completely. It spirals.

Darwin keeps the circle open historically. Peirce keeps it open semiotically. Whitehead keeps it open cosmologically. Peirce teaches us that inquiry begins in surprise and ends only provisionally in habit. Whitehead teaches us that creativity is ultimate, but every actual occasion is already an act of valuation and memorization.

Montévil and Mossio historicize biology against physics. Whitehead historicizes physics through biology. Their theoretical biology shows why organisms cannot be treated as mechanical objects in fixed phase spaces. Whitehead’s speculative organic cosmology extends this biological lesson into physics itself, so that even the apparently generic object is recognized as a high-grade abstraction from societies of occasions whose habits have become extraordinarily stable. The laws of physics are not abolished but naturalized more radically than mechanism permitted.

The result is not genesis without approximations to closure but genesis without final closure. There must be quasi-closures, local circles, organisms, languages, institutions, habits, selves, buddhas, worlds-in-the-making. Without them nothing could inherit anything, nothing could mean anything, nothing could be wounded or redeemed. But every closure is nested in a wider genesis that exceeds it. The circle lives only as a spiral.

Our task is not to choose between a meaningless evolution and an equally nihilistic theory of intelligent design. It is to articulate an evolutionary theology without miracles, a metaphysics of immanent purposiveness without need of a transcendent designer, a process-relational account of cosmogenesis in which human and other organisms are high grade achievements of creative feelings and aims that pervade nature to varying degrees at all scales. Such a theology would not prove God scientifically, but it would help us comprehend how talking animals, born of star death and cellular mitosis, have come to participate consciously in the creative advance of the universe.

We discussed Ruyer’s concepts including “absolute survey,” “mnemic themes,” embryogenesis, and “bonds.” Matter is reinterpreted not as inert substance but as the external appearance of self-organizing domains; bodies are understood as historical activities formed by memory rather than containers that possess memory. Embryogenesis becomes the central image of purposive formation: not a mechanical booting up of a genetic code, but a conscious field of formative agency guided by themes, rhythms, and inherited possibilities. This led into comparisons with Whitehead’s “concrescence,” “eternal objects,” “societies,” distinction between “sense perception” and “bodily reception,” and critique of “simple location.”

We explored how the brain, for Ruyer, should not be treated as the producer of consciousness but as a plastic, embryonic organ of mediation, modulation, filtering, and conceptual formation, a “complex amplifier” (Whitehead) that continues the formative activity of the embryo at the level of perception, imagination, language, and thought.

As Rudolf Steiner put it:

“…one discovers that through this formation of the life of the imagination one grows together with that which is the formative forces of the human body itself; after a time one makes the discovery that the life of thought is, so to speak, nothing other than the diluted life of force of human growth. What forms us inwardly plastically in the physical body from birth to death is…in a ‘diluted’ state…our imaginative life in ordinary consciousness.” (Steiner, 1998, GA 297a, p. 93–94, 17.01.1922)

The second major arc of our dialogue turned toward theology, metaphysics, and ethics. I reflected that Ruyer’s “axiological cogito” in his book Neo-Finalism is a powerful opening move: any denial of meaning, finality, or purpose performs the very sense-making activity it seeks to negate. Science itself presupposes norms such as truth and intelligibility, and so cannot flippantly deny sense or meaning to the universe without undermining their own enterprise.

We then examined Ruyer’s critique of Whitehead’s theology, especially his claim that Whitehead’s distinction between Creativity and God is incomplete or unstable. I questioned whether Ruyer neglected the consequent nature of God, since Whitehead’s dipolar deity already includes both a potentiating lure and a responsive, world-enfolding pole, which seem akin to Ruyer’s own account of a supreme Agent and Ideal as the poles of cosmic becoming, with spatiotemporal actualization unfolding between them.

From there, the conversation widened into an exploration of Aristotle’s unmoved mover, Spinoza’s impersonal yet intimate God, Bergson’s open morality, human rights as historically sedimented habits, and the danger of replacing living ethical discernment with abstract automation.

We closed by linking metaphysics to science: science studies the spatiotemporal work of actualization, but metaphysics tries to think the agent-ideal polarity that makes such work intelligible. Time, action, freedom, contingency, eternity, and possibility all become ways of further contextualizing scientific findings that might otherwise remain both ontologically underdetermined and axiologically destructive (eg, if science thinks its abstract spatiotemporal models are the final reality and tries to make life and consciousness conform to the allegedly deterministic laws of physics).

Jack Bagby's videos on Ruyer:

The agent shared a link to the new film, The Story of Everything, which is based on Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis. I found it well produced and compellingly presented, even if I doubt it will persuade skeptics. There weren’t any new arguments I was not familiar with, at least.

I began by asking Meyer who the film is intended for: skeptics, the uncertain, or those already inclined toward theism who might find in the film a sense of intellectual companionship and public legitimacy? Meyer answered that it was for all of the above, but especially for college and graduate students. He emphasized that the film cannot settle every issue, but can open a porthole into deeper debates, especially given the cultural assumption, amplified by the New Atheists, that science properly understood undermines belief in God. The film, he explained, summarizes three major lines of evidence developed at length in Return of the God Hypothesis: cosmological evidence for a beginning of the universe, physical evidence of fine-tuning, and biological evidence concerning information in DNA and the irreducible complexity of cellular machinery. The film is not meant to function as a technical treatise or philosophical seminar but as an invitation into deeper study.

I next wanted to frame my own position to make clear that I did not want this discussion to fall into the usual binary of scientific materialism versus intelligent design. There are more than two sides here, and indeed, part of my point in this exchange with Meyer is that that typical debate seems to me to remain entirely within the same mechanistic paradigm. Intelligent design theorists just add that God-the-engineer can intervene into the system at various crucial moments to deliver the required software updates. To me, that sort of external interventionism does not capture the intimacy and mutual risk involved in the ongoing process of incarnation (which on this reading is ultimately synonymous with the process of creation).

I told Meyer that I share his sense that scientific materialism is woefully inadequate as an account for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin of human consciousness. Matter conceived as a bunch of blind forces and fields obeying externally imposed laws cannot account for the complexity of the cosmos, the emergence of living organisms, or the human minds capable of doing science. I also agreed with him that neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution (ie, all living form understood reductively as random gene mutation plus natural selection) are inadequate to explain the creativity of life.

Mechanistic materialism is not itself a scientific discovery. It is a metaphysical assertion. Scientific evidence can be interpreted from a variety of metaphysical standpoints—idealism, panpsychism, dualism, process-relational realism, and so forth—without necessarily contradicting empirical findings. Meyer agreed that materialism is better understood as axiomatic than as a direct consequence of observation, and that the axiom itself is dubitable.

Our first major point of divergence concerned the status of God as a scientific hypothesis. I acknowledged that God can function philosophically as an explanation for the intelligibility of nature, ie, why the world is relatively ordered and knowable. I noted that something like this conviction motivated many early modern natural philosophers and scientists, including Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz. Indeed, as Whitehead also argues in Science and the Modern World, historically speaking, theism—the idea that the universe has a rational creator—seems to have played an important role in the inauguration of modern astronomy and physics, which assume that nature is rationally ordered. The very idea of a “law of nature” is downstream of the idea of theistic creation, or God imposing order on an otherwise formless void.

But referencing God as part of a philosophical explanation for intelligibility is very different from bringing God in to provide particular scientific explanations of natural processes. I expressed my concern that treating God as a specific hypothesis to resolve particular scientific problems—fine-tuning, the origin of life, the origin of specified information in DNA—oversteps the proper boundaries of scientific methodology just as much as scientific materialism does.

My concern here was not to defend methodological materialism, as Meyer initially assumed in replying to me. Rather, I was trying to defend a broader sense of causal continuity—not merely efficient causal closure or mechanistic continuity (which I find problematic for various reasons), but a continuity that would include some principled account of formal and final causation. Science, as I understand it, seeks patterned regularities in perceived nature. If we posit an intelligent agent arbitrarily intervening from outside the relational nexus of nature at various points to generate this or that pattern (ie, a software update), then the intelligibility of science itself breaks down. That would be like trying to do scientific research as a character inside a video game and never being sure when the laws of physics might be tinkered with by the programmer.

Meyer pushed back by distinguishing ordinary experimental sciences from the historical sciences. In the historical sciences, he argued, we often reason abductively from present effects back to past causes. Origins questions—cosmogenesis, biogenesis, consciousness—are inevitably metaphysically charged. We cannot avoid metaphysical implications when asking where the universe, life, or mind came from. On his view, methodological naturalism or materialism wrongly restricts the range of possible explanations in advance by insisting that only material causes may count as scientific. He argued that if certain features of nature are known, in our experience, to be produced by minds or intelligent agents, then excluding mind as a possible cause is a methodological prejudice.

I clarified that I was not defending such a materialistic restriction. I explicitly introduced Aristotle’s four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—and said that modern scientific materialism (at least explicitly) recognizes only efficient causation, the push from behind. Of course, implicitly, mechanistic materialism still has its own sort of formal cause operating in the background, but this usually goes un- or under-theorized (just ask a physicist where the eternally fixed laws of physics come from!). Whitehead, by contrast, explicitly reintroduces formal and final causality, and I argued that biology, and indeed physics, cannot be adequately understood without some robust doctrine of formation and purposiveness. I described my position as perhaps a kind of expanded naturalism, a scientific worldview open to immanent teleology, value, and organismic agency, but still resistant to arbitrary external intervention.

Meyer found this refreshing. He brought in Proclus’s expansion of the causal scheme and Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplar causation. In Meyer’s reconstruction, Aquinas breaks both with Aristotle and Plato: against Aristotle, because locating form entirely in matter might lead toward materialism; against Plato, because forms existing in a realm apart from mind do not pass the test of experience. Aquinas’s exemplar causes are ideas in the mind of God, acting to shape matter. Meyer then connected this to his own design argument: form is the product of information, and information, in our experience, is produced by mind. Thus, he sees design detection as an expansion of the explanatory causal toolkit, restoring something like formal and final causation in a way that can be made scientifically rigorous.

He appealed to the iPhone as an example. We cannot explain its origin without reference to the mental agency of Steve Jobs and a team of engineers. By analogy, he argued, when we find the same sorts of effects—specified complexity, functional information, integrated information-processing systems—in cells, we are warranted in inferring mind. This, of course, is a redux of Paley’s watch argument. He also invoked Dembski’s work on the design inference and pointed to cryptography, forensics, archaeology, and SETI as domains where design detection is already accepted in science.

This opened the crucial issue of our conversation, namely, whether intelligent design really overcomes the mechanistic world-picture championed by materialists, or in fact remains trapped within the same imaginary as the materialism it critiques.

I introduced C. S. Peirce, noting that in his book Meyer draws on his account of abductive reasoning for his own methodological approach. Meyer confirmed that Peirce was one of his heroes and that abductive reasoning was also central to the first chapter of his PhD thesis. But I wanted to push beyond Peirce’s method of abduction into his cosmology and theology, since for him, abduction only makes sense methodologically within that broader metaphysical context. Peirce called himself an objective idealist, but I suggested he could also be read as an evolutionary panentheist. This is different from what usually gets labeled as “theistic evolution,” because Peirce did not understand cosmic or biotic evolution mechanistically. Rather, he saw chance, continuity, habit, semiosis, and agapic love as woven into the becoming of the cosmos from top to bottom, start to finish. God is intimately involved in cosmic creativity, not its external designer and unmoved mover.

You can read more about Peirce’s views here:

I then laid out my biggest issue with intelligent design. It rejects the claim that blind matter can assemble the world-machine by itself, but it does not at all challenge the mechanistic image nature. Meyer frequently describes cells as factories. DNA is treated as context-free information or software. Organisms are imagined as artifacts or machines shaped by God like a potter shapes clay. Design is imagined as an idealization of human engineering: the external assembly of parts according to a preexisting plan (which is an idealization since in real design processes, prototypes are needed, leading to revisions, tinkering, etc., before a workable machine arises). I asked, what happens if we drop the machine and computer metaphors and instead adopt the organic metaphor, as Schelling, Bergson, Peirce, Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin each do in different ways?

The machine metaphor does not just affect how we understand nature, but we understand the God-world relation and the very nature of the act of creation. If nature is a machine, God is imagined as an engineer who is fundamentally untouched by what is created. If nature is an organism, God may be better understood as the incarnate lure immanent in cosmic becoming, the persuasive aim toward beauty, intensity, life, and mind. The world is God’s body; God suffers with creatures. This organic vision seems to me to be far more consonant with the event described in the New Testament, for those who pay attention to such things!

Meyer responded in a more nuanced way than I expected. He said that life contains machines, but is not itself a machine. Organisms are self-organizing unities in Kant’s sense, they are not just collections of parts. In a mechanical assemblage, cause and effect relations are linear and traceable from discrete antecedents. In an organic unity, causes and effects loop into one another in ways that approach a kind of inexhaustible complexity. He suggested that living systems may even be computationally incomplete in the formal sense: their full complexity cannot be exhausted within finite computational time.

This was an important concession, but I am not sure how seriously to take it given how often Meyer leans on the machine metaphor across all of his work. He also said there is an ongoing discussion among intelligent design theorists about whether organisms show a kind of inexhaustible complexity that may require a transcendent designer whose intelligence is not merely finite or computational. In this respect, Meyer sees organismic complexity itself as potentially deepening, rather than weakening, the design inference.

But he then insisted that the argument from specified complexity is not merely metaphorical. The analogy between DNA and computer code, he said, may be a metaphor rhetorically, but the design inference is grounded in formal criteria from information and complexity theories. Complexity is inversely related to probability. He granted you could explain complexification without a designer. But specification is a distinct issue for him, since it involves an arrangement that achieves a significant function or outcome. When both complexity and specificity are jointly instantiated, he argued, we have sufficient warrant for inferring design. Human language, computer code, and the information coded in DNA all instantiate these two features. So the argument, in his view, is not based merely on loose analogies but on an identity of formally characterized features of the systems in question.

I then pressed the issue of biological information. From a Peircean or process-relational perspective, DNA does not contain information in a simply located way. Its meaning and function arise within the context of the whole cellular milieu, the cell’s relation to its environment, and the entire historical sequence of organism-environment relations inherited from its ancestors. DNA only becomes biologically meaningful in relation to proteins, membranes, metabolism, regulatory networks, repair systems, cytoplasmic structure, developmental fields, and so on. A codon does not interpret itself. The genome is not software for booting up an organism. Even as metaphor, the claim is sorely lacking in that it backgrounds all the context that makes biological creativity and self-organization so fascinating.

Meyer replied that the independence of sequence from chemical necessity is what establishes the presence of specified complexity. There is nothing in the chemistry of DNA that determines the exact sequencing or functional outcome. He agreed that DNA cannot do anything without ribosomes and the whole translation apparatus. But he argued that this resembles high-tech digital computing systems, where information storage, processing, and translation require an integrated system.

I objected that computers are specifically engineered to eliminate stochasticity, whereas cells exploit stochasticity. Living systems operate amid Brownian motion, molecular fluctuations, chance encounters, and dynamic self-organization. The cell is not like a carefully insulated microprocessor whose randomness has been suppressed as much as possible. The cell is a teeming matrix where chaos and order are intertwined. Its order is not imposed in the way an Apple engineer imposes order on silicon. Its molecular machinery operates in a milieu where spontaneity is not merely a bug but feature of life’s mode of existence, part of what makes organisms so adaptable to novel situations.

Meyer pushed back in a way that makes the rift clearer, reaffirming my sense that we have very different images of what constitutes order and intelligence in the natural world. He said stochastic processes are the enemy of cellular information processing. When errors occur, the cell has proofreading and error-correction systems to “subjugate chaos” into informational order. For him, Brownian motion is not a source of organismic creativity but a problem that the machinery of life must overcome.

From my perspective, this sort of push back illustrated how Meyer’s imagination is still strongly organized around the machine metaphor. I am trying to think the cell as an organismic nexus that makes positive use of the fact that it is constantly riding the wave crest between order and chaos. He sees stochasticity as something life must master. I see it as part of the creative matrix out of which life’s order continually arises.

I then turned to Meyer’s footnote on Charles Hartshorne. In Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer objects to Hartshornean panentheism by arguing that while we have broad experience of intelligent agents generating specified information, “we do not have experience of designing agents changing in their fundamental nature as a result of generating such information or designing technological objects.”

I told Meyer that this sentence jumped out at me because it strikes me as a naïve understanding of human intelligence. The history of the human species is precisely the story of our co-evolution with technology. Human minds are not disembodied monads that only later express their intelligence through tools. We became the beings we are through our relations with stone axes, fire, cooking, clothing, shelter, ritual, language, agriculture, writing, clocks, printing presses, computers, digital media, etc. Our physiology, perception, memory, sociality, attention, and self-understanding have all been transformed by what we make.

I mentioned Terrence Deacon’s wonderful book The Symbolic Species, where language is treated not merely as a product of an already finished human brain but as a symbolic ecology that helped reshape the brain. I also invoked Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates worries that the alphabet will degrade memory. The point is that technologies are not simply designed by an aloof intelligence, but immediately feedback upon their designers, transforming intelligence in turn. Human designers are changed by their designs. We are not unmoved movers. This obviously has implications for how we imagine divine intelligence. If we are imago dei, then…?

Meyer replied by emphasizing the phrase “fundamental nature.” He was willing to acknowledge neuroplasticity. But he rejected the idea that tools or technologies have fundamentally transformed human physiology. He saw that claim as too dependent on a macroevolutionary story about human origins that he does not accept. From his perspective, technology can affect attention spans, cognition, or behavior, but it does not provide evidence for fundamental anatomical transformation.

I suppose I should have expected his easy way out of my argument. Just deny that Homo sapiens evolved! Fair enough. Meyer’s response insulated “fundamental nature” from historical transformation by definition. If fundamental nature means an abstract metaphysical essence—human nature as decreed by God in a once and done way—then of course technology cannot alter it. But if fundamental nature means the concrete form of life that humans actually enact—our bodies, gestures, attention, language, sociality, memory, rituals, and sense of selfhood, etc.—then technologies have transformed us profoundly. Here again, the issue is his model of intelligence. He treats intelligence as something already constituted, which then produces artifacts. I understand intelligence as relational, extended, embodied, developmental, and historically transformed by its own expressions. I do think there is something like a human nature, but it is precisely our nature to transform.

Meyer rehearsed his standard critique of macroevolutionary change using developmental gene regulatory networks. He explained Eric Davidson’s work on how gene regulatory networks choreograph animal development. These networks function like integrated circuits controlling the timing and expression of genetic information. Attempts to alter core elements of these networks terminate development. Therefore, if transforming one body plan into another requires changing one developmental gene regulatory network into another, and those networks cannot be altered without destroying development, then macroevolutionary transformation becomes deeply problematic.

I brought in developmental biologist ’s work at Tufts on bioelectricity and morphogenesis. Levin has shown that in organisms such as frogs and planaria, one can alter large-scale developmental outcomes—putting functional eyes on frog legs, inducing two-headed flatworms, and so on—by manipulating bioelectric patterns rather than changing the underlying DNA. This suggests levels of informational organization above the genetic sequence. Meyer responded that ID theorists are not genetic reductionists and that they welcome the discovery of hierarchical information at multiple levels. Indeed, for him, such higher-level information refutes neo-Darwinian reductionism. But he argued that induced macromutations or developmental alterations of this sort are generally non-heritable and deleterious. Thus, while he finds Levin’s work interesting, he sees it as deepening the problem of where the higher-level information comes from rather than explaining it naturalistically.

He also mentioned James Shapiro’s “natural genetic engineering,” where mutations are not random but triggered by environmental changes and brought under algorithmic control. Meyer appreciated Shapiro’s work but again located design in the pre-programmed adaptive capacity itself. If organisms have algorithmically controlled adaptive systems, then for Meyer the question becomes: where did the algorithmic control come from?

With all too many threads left dangling, in the time we had left I wanted to transition to the cosmological question of fine-tuning. I reiterated my concern that Meyer’s approach still relies on the mechanistic metaphor: the universe is a machine whose primordial dials—laws, constants, initial conditions—must be perfectly set in advance from outside by a transcendent designing intelligence. I contrasted this with Peirce’s cosmology, where matter is “effete mind” and laws of physics are more like emergent habits than externally imposed decrees. From a Peircean and Whiteheadian perspective, fine-tuning could be understood as the canalization of cosmic habits, ie, stable patterns of order that emerge, deepen, and persist because they make possible richer forms of aesthetic contrast and complexity, eventually generating life and consciousness. God is still involved, but not as a construction manager barking orders from outside the system. In Whitehead’s scheme, God is eternal and primordial with respect to possibility, but consequent with respect to the actuality of the historical becoming of nature. God is the immanent lure, the persuasive aim toward beauty goading an ensouled universe into richer expression, rather than the predetermining designer of a machine that lacks any real creativity of its own.

Meyer objected that talk of laws as historically emergent habits is, at least at present, speculative. Our observations of regularities such as Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell’s equations, and gravitational law have been stable over the period available to us. I objected that, relative to the supposed age of the universe, our period of observation is absurdly narrow, but I admitted, like him, I was doing speculative philosophy here. But Meyer’s point was that we lack empirical evidence that the laws themselves have evolved. He regarded the Peircean-Whiteheadian view as a philosophical posit rather than something compelled by experience. I grant that, within the observational range available to us, the regularities we model appear stable enough to support prediction. But our lack of evidence for evolving “laws” (ie, cosmic habits) may tell us as much about the methodological assumptions built into mechanistic physics as about the ultimate nature of law. As a methodological rule, the time-invariance of laws is a sound axiom. But as an ontological claim, it is much more easily contested. Science needs models with stable parameters, but it does not follow that nature is governed by eternally fixed, ahistorical laws existing outside the creative advance. Human habits can be difficult to change after decades. Cosmic habits, established over billions of years, are unimaginably more entrenched. So the fact that we do not observe them changing over a few centuries of mathematical physics is not surprising.

I should also note, in response to Meyer’s claim that we do not observe changes to laws, that we do not empirically observe eternal laws existing outside time and imposing order on nature, either. What we observe are stable statistical regularities. Whether these regularities are interpreted as timeless laws or deeply canalized habits is a metaphysical question. If we assume from the start that laws are timeless, we will build models designed to find timeless laws and treat every anomaly as evidence of a deeper invariance. We may thereby blind ourselves to the possibility that lawfulness itself has a history.

Meyer went on to clarify his disagreement with panentheism. In the cosmological case, he thinks the force of the explanation comes from divine transcendence. A panentheistic God, in his view, seems parasitic upon classical theism insofar as it needs transcendence to explain the origin of the universe. After that, one can ask whether divine ordering is gradually infused through an evolutionary process or whether new design appears discretely along the cosmic timeline. Meyer sees more evidence for the latter: the Big Bang, the abrupt emergence of life around 3.8 billion years ago, the Cambrian explosion of new animal body plans. He is thus inclined toward a theistic view of a transcendent God who creates the universe as a whole and acts detectably at discrete points along the timeline, rather than a primarily gradualist panentheistic account.

I suggested that Peirce, Whitehead, Hartshorne, and company are not denying transcendence but reconceiving it. Meyer acknowledged that the Whitehead-Hartshorne view does affirm divine transcendence as well as immanence, but he thought its emphasis on gradual evolutionary emergence does not fit the empirical pattern as he reads it. He concluded that we were not as far apart as it might seem: both views affirm design in some sense; the difference concerns whether design is effected more gradually and immanently or more discretely and detectably by a transcendent divine agent. I appreciate his attempt at conciliation, but I felt we were much further apart than he was acknowledging!

I ended by saying that we had scratched many surfaces and would need more time to go deeper. Meyer agreed and said this was the most extensive interview he had done on these themes. He also said there is much to appreciate in Whitehead and Peirce, though he is more sympathetic to Peirce’s epistemology and logic than to his metaphysics. I personally do not think the two can be so easily prized apart. Neither did Peirce:

To sum up, then:

I remain convinced that Meyer’s intelligent design argument depends on a disembodied, idealized engineering model of intelligence. Intelligence is inferred from fine-tuning, specified information, and the apparent design of biological machinery. Though Meyer explicitly denied reducing organisms to machines, his explanatory imagination remains dominated by an engineering mentality.

My concern is that this model of intelligence treats intelligence as a source of information standing outside the system it designs. It imagines God, by analogy, as a transcendent agent whose creative activity does not alter God’s own being. This is why Meyer finds Hartshorne and process panentheism unconvincing: he assumes that a God affected by creation is somehow less capable of explaining order. But from my point of view, creation is always co-creation. A God unaffected by creation cannot be loving, cannot incarnate, and is nothing at all like the actual intelligences we know in human beings, who are supposedly created in God’s image. If our relational modes of creativity are in any way reflective of God’s, then God cannot remain entirely unmoved.

On my view, God is more the Relator than the Creator of the universe. God lures the world toward richer forms of order, intensity, beauty, life, and consciousness, and God is enriched by the world’s achievements and sufferings. Creation is not a manufacturing operation. Life is not a factory. God’s creative act is risky, a genuine adventure. God is involved in creation and so evolves with us.

Below is a revised transcript of some of my reflections in response to his interview questions for Volume Two.

The Practice of Speculative Philosophy

Speculative philosophy begins, for me, with the questions that human beings cannot help but ask, even though we should not expect scientific answers to them. Lest we forget, we are beings that die. We know this, and it envelopes our lives in mystery. Who are we before we were born? Where does the universe come from, and where is it going? Is there a purpose or a telos to this cosmogenetic process? These are speculative questions. I agree with Kant, at least on the point he makes at the very beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, that human beings are burdened by these questions. We cannot help but ask them.

The fact that these questions do not admit of straightforward scientific answers does not make them less necessary. They are speculative, but no less important for all that. The challenge is to come up with criteria to assess our speculations so that they are not just an anything goes free for all. Speculative philosophy should not be an excuse for intellectual irresponsibility. It is not merely the production of elaborate fantasies about the self or the universe. It is an attempt to ask the unavoidable questions in a disciplined way, with some sense of what counts as adequacy, coherence, fruitfulness, and transformative power.

Speculative philosophy is a mode of inquiry that has always had a deep allure for me. The first reflections I would now call speculative arose in childhood, before I had any technical vocabulary for them. In contemplating death, I began to realize that it did not make sense to me that consciousness might somehow simply terminate at death. I did not yet have the language of philosophy, psychology, or religious studies. That came later, in high school, when I began studying the psychology of religion and philosophy proper. But I was already drawn into that mode of reflection on life as a child because of my confrontation with the inevitability death. That was the origin point of my philosophical life. Philosophy has always been, for me, preparation for dying, as Socrates put it. Not in a morbid sense, not as a turning away from life, but as an attempt to understand life within a wider horizon than my personal story. Death functions as a kind of speculative wound. It forces us to ask what consciousness is, what a self is, what a cosmos is, whether value and memory and love are merely temporary arrangements of matter or whether they reflect our participation in a more pneumatic or spiritual reality.

Without a more cosmic perspective on myself, I would probably feel quite lost. That is one of the things that drives me to teach and to do philosophy in public: to develop for myself and to offer that sort of perspective to others. It is very easy, in an extremely psychologized culture, to get trapped in one’s own heroic ego story. Psychoanalysis is important and can be very helpful. But without a cosmic background, and without a larger historical arc in which to place oneself, life can become profoundly alienating and lonely. Leading a meaningful life, for me, requires feeling that I am part of a larger conversation with the rest of humanity over millennia, and even beyond that, a participant in the evolutionary journey of the entire cosmic community.

I could get more speculative about the nature of that community, which I intuit goes beyond human beings and even beyond biological creatures. But minimally, I think there is a sense to be made of communion with Sophia, with Wisdom. For me, philosophy and speculation have opened the door to forms of existence that invite us into an even wider sense of community. The philosopher is not simply a private individual trying to solve puzzles. The philosopher is someone drawn into communion with wisdom and with others who are also drawn by wisdom.

That is why I do not think of philosophy simply as my individual relationship or friendship with wisdom. It is shared communal inquiry. In a genuine philosophical community, we are able not just to criticize someone’s ideas in the abstract, but to hold one another accountable for how we comport ourselves toward the good. That is not easy. There is always a gap in community between the ideal and the reality. A graduate program in philosophy has all the restrictions that come with maintaining accreditation and assessment, and the subtle and not so subtle hierarchies that grading implies. It is also shaped by the professionalization of philosophy and by the creation of a knowledge industry. All of those pressures make it more difficult to authentically engage as a philosophical community. They are there. We should not pretend otherwise.

There is also the post-COVID reality of online education and the way it has transformed my graduate department’s learning community. The embeddedness of the community has been diluted. There has been a loss there. Something important happens when people share a room, eat together, argue in hallways, walk after seminars, and become part of a place. Online education can flatten some of that.

But with a little extra effort, it is possible to maintain a sense of human connection online. And something else has become possible. We now have a truly planetary community, with students across many continents. That diversity in the online classroom allows us to accelerate the process of planetizing and pluralizing philosophy. It is much easier to remain U.S.-centric in an in-person classroom where most of the students are citizens of the same country. In the online classroom, I have to be more deliberate when I say “we.” Who am I talking about? Human beings? Americans? Westerners? Academics? Modern people? The “we” becomes more abstract, but also more demanding.

A common human identity is an ideal we strive for. I think that is one of the things philosophy has always been doing, at least since the cosmopolitan urge that emerged in ancient Greece. But it is also important not to lose sight of the places we inhabit and the particularities of culture and language. The task is not to erase difference in pursuit of some bland universal community. The task is to seek a universal community that can remain attentive to particularity. Philosophy must hold both together: a cosmopolitan aspiration and a rooted sense of place, culture, and language.

This is where speculative philosophy touches the problem of citizenship and cultural agency. It is dangerous to point too quickly to some abstract universal aspect of human nature. Claims about universal humanity have often turned out to be modern European biases masquerading as neutral truths. Our vision of cosmopolitics needs to be tweaked, perhaps even thoroughly renovated. But I still feel that some kind of cosmic identity can allow us to relate as human beings across difference, not despite our diversity, but from within our diverse cultural and ethnic points of view.

That shared humanness might be rooted in nothing more, or nothing less, than our philosophical interest and our desire to learn. I think the desire to learn, to spend one’s whole life in pursuit of deepening understanding, to remain curious about the unknown in relation to some idea of goodness or harmony or beauty or truth, is a human universal. It is always dangerous to say such a thing, but this seems to me a safe enough candidate. All societies, in different ways, have tried to cultivate this desire. Therein lies the basis for a new form of philosophical community, perhaps even the basis for a planetary civilization.

Speculative philosophy also has a distinctive role in relation to art, science, and religion. I would not want to mush them all together. One of the major boons of modernity has been their differentiation and the recognition of the unique dignities of the beautiful, the true, and the good, respectively. The distinctions matter. Art, science, and religion each have their own internal languages, practices, standards, and powers of disclosure. I see the philosopher’s role, particularly in the modern period, as downstream of their differentiation, not trying to undo it. The philosopher’s role is to accept the differentiation but avoid the dissociation of these value spheres.

The artist is not usually doing that kind of integrative work. The scientist is not usually doing that. Some theologians might be trying to do that. But the danger in modernity and postmodernity is that art, science, and religion simply go their own way, develop their own internal languages, and begin competing with each other for primacy. I do not think the aim should be to return to a point when they were all unified. There is no simple restoration of an earlier whole. But speculative philosophy has an important role in developing a generic language that allows us to translate between these domains.

By “generic,” I do not mean dead and abstract. I mean fluid enough that, when we discuss the relationships among science, religion, and art—and the true, the good, and the beautiful—we do not feel we are collapsing the differences. Instead, we are finding a way to say that a fulfilling human life would include sensitivity to each of these values. Philosophy can help develop a language to express that. It can mediate without reducing. It can hold open relations among truth, goodness, and beauty without forcing them into a single formula.

Speculative thought enriches our experience of the world in a deep way because it gives us a larger background against which to understand our lives. It can cultivate creativity, insight, freedom of speech, and freedom of thinking. But that freedom can also leave you more isolated if it is not held in community and dialogue. The categories are supposed to be fashioned in the agora, in a shared context of justification and mutual enrichment. Speculative freedom is real, but it is also dangerous. It needs the attention of others. It needs the friction of conversation.

One core virtue of the speculative philosopher, or really of any philosopher, is that one is never done learning. That is basic. Philosophy does not culminate in the possession of a system that settles everything. It is a lifelong refinement of perspective, a willingness to remain answerable to what one does not yet understand. This is one reason speculative philosophy can cultivate a different kind of citizenship. If the desire to learn is deepened and widened, then citizenship is no longer merely a matter of belonging to a nation-state. It becomes a way of belonging to a cosmos, to humanity, to the long historical conversation, and perhaps to more-than-human forms of community. We cannot finally know ourselves except in relation to others.

But the virtues of speculative philosophy cannot be separated from its vices. Radical openness comes with risks: delusion, escapism, self-indulgence, self-aggrandizement. It is easy to say that negatively, but there are great works of art that exist only because of the madness that led to the creator’s obsession. You never know until after the fact whether something was true creative genius or just madness and inflation. The difficulty is how to deal with the potential vice without squashing the possibility that an artistic, philosophical, or scientific gift is being midwifed into the world through that very intensity. Discernment is tough here.

I think community, and the kind of frank criticism that comes from holding one another accountable in the context of community, is probably the best antidote. Those who know you well in the context of community life together can hopefully see when a project or an idea is going somewhere and is worth the suffering it might bring in its wake, and when it is probably not. We need our friends to help us. We need people who can distinguish, or at least help us try to distinguish, between genuine vocation and destructive inflation, between the difficult birth of an idea and the self-enclosure of obsession.

This question of speculative philosophy’s relation to character is complicated. Some great speculative philosophers seem to have been thoughtful, caring, and ethically serious. Whitehead and Bergson, at least from the usual lives-of-the-philosophers narratives, seem to have been human, certainly, but also people who tried to care for others and to develop as persons. On the other side, there are the Beethoven personalities: tumultuous, difficult, romantically and emotionally volatile. Schelling, especially the young Schelling, is an example. There is something about speculative intensity that can give us something profoundly valuable and yet also limit character, or at least place character under unusual pressure.

You can definitely see Schelling’s personality coming through in his work. You can also see the effect of the tragedies that occurred in his life. First Auguste dies, and then Caroline dies several years later. After that, Schelling never publishes anything significant again. The 1809 Freedom Essay appears the same year Caroline dies, if I recall correctly, and in Schelling’s letters we can see that he shifted into a deeply melancholic mood. That suffering did, I think, deepen his philosophy.

The young Schelling was more idealistic in his pursuit of a systematic way of approaching the absolute, even if his approach was more romantically tinged than Hegel’s. Later in life, all of a sudden, he becomes more interested in a thick description of the deities of Samothrace, or mythology as material that deserves careful philosophical analysis and representation. He moves in a more occult direction and seems less concerned with the clarity and distinctness that systematic conceptual analysis can provide. He wants to go further into the more occluded, darker, more mysterious dimensions of existence, while still bringing conceptual rigor. He no longer expects existence as such to be exhaustively plumbed by concepts.

That shift in Schelling seems very much the result of Caroline’s death and the suffering that remained with him for the rest of his life. In that sense, Schelling is a good example of how life happening can guide one’s philosophical shift. Biography enters metaphysics. The work is not detached from the wounds of the thinker.

But the deeper question is whether the work itself informs one’s character. Is there a real relationship between speculative philosophy and ethical character, or is it simply that some great speculative philosophers are good people and some are not? Fichte says that the type of philosophy one adopts depends on the type of person one is. I would like to think the relationship is bidirectional. Based on your own character, your pre-philosophical attitudes, you are drawn to particular forms of philosophy. But then, as you study philosophy and refine your perspective, that should feed back into your character.

It really depends, though. If philosophy is merely a profession, if you clock in and teach and publish and do the required things, you might not get that feedback whereby you become a different person as a result of what you are studying. In the context of contemporary universities, I do not think there is much emphasis placed on the philosophical ideas you study transforming you as a person. It is more a matter of getting the open position at Harvard, publishing in the right journal, making the kind of argument that will be respectable, and so on. All of those professional factors get in the way. There is an ethos there, but it is not a philosophical ethos. It is a professional, neoliberal, competitive marketplace ethos.

What is unique about the program I teach in is that when I interview applicants and ask whether they are considering an academic career, I am very honest with them. There are not many positions open. It is not going to be easy. I would not get your hopes up. Those who still come into the program do so because studying philosophy is basicallly a life or death issue. It is not really about whether they can get a job. No one goes into philosophy, initially, because of the professional payoff.

Having students with whom I can be honest about this, who want to come anyway, affords a different quality of classroom experience and a different learning environment. I wish we could get them all placed in tenure-track positions. But precisely because the professional payoff is not the primary motivation, we are able to raise our sights a little above the mundane professional side of it and really think about how these ideas transform us as people and how they can transform culture at large. We can take a long view of the whole history of philosophy and see that it may take centuries for ideas to really change day-to-day institutional life. But there is still meaning in planting seeds that may take centuries to take root and flower. There is meaning in that. It is a privilege to teach in a place where students feel they can pursue ideas at that transformative level.

In the classroom and in advising, our approach is to help students give voice to their own ideas rather than forcing them to confess to ours. We guide them and offer critical feedback, not to shut them down but to help them refine their points of view. We are a very pluralist department, and not just as a way of being nice or inclusive. It is an ontological commitment. In some sense, as pluralist scholars might say, we live in a world of many worlds. This is deeper than multiculturalism or shallow perspectivism. It is a speculative commitment to what William James called the pluriverse.

There is a real good that comes from encouraging intelligent people to pursue their intuitions and to gain the confidence to articulate their visions precisely and convincingly. We are trying to help students become philosophers, which means helping them become who they are, rather than getting them to conform to what we believe the proper way is, or what the correct paradigm or theory is. That does not mean anything goes. It means the task of philosophical education is not indoctrination into a system but the cultivation of a voice capable of responsibility to truth, precision of expression, fearless imagination and speculative courage.

Advising dissertations is another important site of speculative mentorship. Sometimes the work involves trimming when something has become overgrown. As a professor and teacher, one of the difficult skills I had to learn was how to be critical. I came to realize that students really need constructive criticism. Even if, on a personal level, it feels difficult to give someone bad news about their work, it is in their best interest when it is done in the right way. There is a way of conveying criticism that inspires them to do better, because it is couched in reflection on their strengths and on the solid foundation they have to build on.

Everyone has a unique perspective, and part of the work is encouraging that uniqueness while helping them make the best argument they can. That is what speculative mentorship involves: not forcing students into an inherited mold, but helping them refine what is genuinely theirs until it becomes communicable and persuasive.

So the practice of speculative philosophy is not merely an academic path. It is a lived mode of inquiry. It shapes the life of thought and, eventually, culture at large. It opens us to death and to wisdom, to community and to the cosmos, to the plurality of worlds and the hope for a planetary form of co-existence. It mediates among art, science, and religion without collapsing them. It cultivates freedom, but that freedom requires accountability to others. It can deepen character, but only if philosophy is not reduced to a profession. It can generate madness and inflation, but also tremendous creative gifts. The antidote to inflation is not to stop speculating. The antidote is friendship, criticism, dialogue, and a community capable of holding us accountable to a good that always transcends us.

The speculative philosopher is never done learning. That is the simplest formulation. To speculate is to remain open to the unknown, to seek a language adequate to truth, goodness, and beauty, to plant seeds whose flowering one may never see, and to participate in a conversation far older and wider than oneself. Philosophy begins, for me, in the fact that we die. But it does not end there. Death opens the question, a wound that if met with wonder begins to open into mystery, into cosmic community, and into wisdom.

Fresh little Yucatán angel bites
burned around my bare, sweat beading
ankles like a rosary, souvenirs of last night’s
restaurant courtyard shadows
in the damp dusk.

Mérida’s narrow one-way streets
and imposing interlinked facades
are ovens in the heat of day,
but the stone still rests lightly,
a remnant of the asteroid Chicxulub
that sent the saurians to their graves,
the low murmur of gravitational bruising
still lingering in the limestone.

Every calle a corridor
of pastel color and parked motos,
stray cats and electric wires
hanging overhead like exposed neurons.
Faded yellows, pinks, sea-green blues,
paint chipping, gates rusted.

Suddenly a wide wooden door swings open
revealing another world within:
a lush courtyard, arching palms,
bougainvillea exploding over
tiled fountain pools.

Mérida teaches suspicion of surfaces.
Grilled shrimp, diesel fuel,
ceiba flowers, and sewage
mingle in the same scorching air.

I stop before the cathedral.
Locals slip by me,
already knowing which walls
hide little Edens
or old family feuds,
which have gone to Airbnb
or still belong to abuelas.

The cathedral presents itself as a fortress.
A church built by Maya hands
under Spanish colonial domination
from the bones of their own temple.

Before the conquistadors
claimed it for their Crown,
Mérida was T’Ho, a Mayan city.

Before the Virgin
there was the serpent.

The temple Yajam Cumu,
sanctuary of the cosmic serpent god
Bakluumchaan,
was dismantled to build the cathedral,
the oldest in the mainland Americas.

I followed a few Méridans
into the cathedral
just as mass began,
by chance, or by Christ.

I stood in the pews.
I prayed for peace.

Sweat soaked shirt
and professor head full
of colonial guilt and serpent gods,
a barely understood Spanish liturgy in my ears,
a war weary world in my heart,
I rehearsed the Lion Pope’s remarks.

“The future belongs to men and women of peace.”

Mary made her way into my mind.
She dropped into my heart.
I felt the limestone weeping.

“In the end, justice will always triumph
over injustice, just as violence,
despite all appearances,
will never have the last word.”

The following is a transcript of my talk earlier today at our Mind-at-Large Project’s inaugural conference, “A New Dawn.” Video of all the talks, including this one, will be available in a few weeks on the Mind-at-Large website.

Buenos días, everyone. I’m here at the Casa Oasis Guest House in Mérida, on the ancestral lands of the Yucatec Maya, whose descendants continue to live here on the Yucatán Peninsula. I want to acknowledge that the land beneath me is not some abstract space where human beings can simply plug and play, but a living inheritance shaped by generations of relationships among human beings, and also among animals, forests, waters, and the more-than-human world. In a spirit of respect, gratitude, and reciprocity, I want to honor the enduring presence and sovereignty of the Maya people, past and present.

I want to begin by saying a bit about the aims of this project.

Obviously, as we’ve seen over the last few days, there are widening cracks in the edifice of reductive physicalism. However, most academic researchers still continue to treat mind as a mere byproduct of skull-enclosed electrochemistry. From our point of view here on the Mind-at-Large team, and I assume for many of you joining us, those electrons and neurochemicals are not just dead stuff, nor are they skull-bound. They are ecologically extended, experiential processes in their own right.

So this idea that nature is devoid of mind until brains somehow secrete it, as though that same dead stuff could be transformed into conscious life simply by rearranging it, is not a scientific fact. It is not even, so far as I am concerned, a coherent scientific theory. It is a metaphysical assertion that denies that it is a metaphysics. It is a materialist dogma, and a rather irrational one at that.

The Mind-at-Large Project is our attempt to tear down the wall that physicalism has erected to protect itself from alternative views, views which, as the talks we’ve heard over the last few days have demonstrated, may turn out to be more scientifically justified and more philosophically illuminating than the attachment to reductionistic methods has heretofore allowed us to consider.

If some modicum of mind pervades nature at every scale, from light to life to logic, that is, from photons to cells to human persons, if consciousness is not just the private property of disembodied Cartesian substances but a relational process or an experiential field within which we are embedded, then we are dealing not with a normal scientific problem anymore, not with some narrow technical puzzle, but with a new civilizational charter, really, a broadening of our cultural and even our spiritual horizons.

There have already been plenty of powerful critiques of physicalism, and we welcome more. But we also want to look forward. Our guiding question, as I would frame it, is this: what new theoretical and ethical possibilities open up for us if consciousness is not treated as an illusion to be explained away, but as the inner essence of the cosmos as a whole?

So that is what we are up to with the Mind-at-Large Project. This is just the first year. We are only just inaugurating it, and we are very glad you are along for the journey.

Let me now switch gears and transition to my own talk. The title of my talk is Human Consciousness in a Cybernetic Age, or Why Logos Is Not a Loom. Hopefully you recognize this man. This is Georg Hegel. I’ll speak about him in a moment.

I want to explore what happens to our understanding of consciousness when the dominant metaphor for mind becomes the computer, when cognition is reduced to computation. I want to argue that the consequences of taking this metaphor too literally, the consequences for our understanding of ourselves and the world, are dire.

I think it is a suggestive metaphor, the claim that cognition is computation, but I want to challenge it. Metaphors are not just the shiny paint job on the vehicle of cognition. They are the engine of thought. They drive the limits of conceivability. They shape what we can think and what we cannot think.

I mentioned Hegel because I will be drawing on his early critique of the mind-machine analogy. He was writing in the first part of the nineteenth century. He is a German Idealist, and I would say he remains relevant today in our cybernetic age not despite the fact that he comes from a pre-digital era, but precisely because he comes from a time before we had been all but fully captured by the analogy between mind and machine.

One of the roles of philosophy, as I see it, especially in a technoscientific age, is to help us notice analogies as analogies, thereby allowing us to avoid the kind of misplaced concreteness that might otherwise hijack our thinking.

In our cybernetic age, this metaphor, that cognition is computation, has calcified into something approaching common sense. It is repeated in popular science writing, in neuroscience journals, in AI advertising campaigns, in venture capital rhetoric, in policy documents, and in research funding proposals. We are told that brains are information processors, that memory is a kind of physical storage, that perception is input and action is output. We are told that intelligence is an algorithm for free-energy minimization, that language mastery is a matter of statistical prediction, and that with enough training data and compute, consciousness itself will eventually be artificially engineered.

There are enormous economic and institutional forces reinforcing this picture. Massive tech advertising budgets are now devoted to normalizing the idea that language models like ChatGPT and Claude engage in a form of thought. There are decades of sunk cost in computational neuroscience and AI research that have created powerful incentives encouraging us to imagine that this suggestive analogy is really an established scientific ontology.

The danger here is not merely theoretical. It is not just that we are getting consciousness wrong. It is also existential, because we risk losing sight of the fact that, while machines are being anthropomorphized, we are also increasingly being mechanized.

To be clear, I am not here to rehearse Luddite arguments that we should all destroy our machines. We are here communicating with each other and sharing these ideas because of technology. My argument is not anti-tech. My argument is that we must resist the equation of cognition with computation.

This is not because human intelligence is somehow pure and technology can only pollute it. Quite the contrary. As I argue in a chapter in the book AI Ethics and Practice, titled “The Philosophical Implications of Artificial Intelligence,” human intelligence has always already been artificial in the sense that it has always been extended, augmented, and amplified by our tools, by media technologies, including language itself.

Speech is already an artifact. It is an externalization of thought. The alphabet, print, radio, the internet, all of these are technical prostheses of thought. Human intelligence is already, in some sense, artificial, in that it depends upon the tools our species has been co-evolving with for millions of years.

Our mouths are only nimble enough to speak because stone tools and fire allowed us to cut and cook our food, thereby allowing our jaw muscles to shrink and our brains to grow, filling the extra space in our skulls. Our symbolic culture, as Terrence Deacon argues in his great book The Symbolic Species, has changed our brains. So our intelligence, in that sense, is already artificial. We were cyborgs long before the first microchip was manufactured.

So again, my argument is not that we should reject technology. I am seeking, rather, to caution against the acceptance of false analogies. I will repeat that a few times just to make it clear. There are good use cases for large language models. But the creation of convincing machine mimicries of mind, simulations of autonomous computational intelligence, is not the same thing as creating actual independent machine minds with an inner life of their own. It is a mere machination, a ruse, in other words.

LLMs do not cognize. They do not think, understand, or know anything. They simulate the products of cognition by reweaving the linguistic traces that human acts of cognition have left behind. To borrow and revise a metaphor from Hegel, LLMs are like mechanical looms. They are not incarnations of Logos. They are looms.

I do not have time to give a full introduction to Hegel. He is a thinker who comes in the aftermath of Immanuel Kant’s revolution, his transcendental method of philosophy inaugurated in 1781. Kant wanted to put metaphysics on a scientific basis and understand what the mind provides a priori in shaping our experience of the world before we have experienced anything at all. In other words, Kant wanted to look at the instrument of our knowing in order to understand how it operates and thereby justify our scientific knowledge of the world.

Of course, Kant left us with a kind of epistemological dualism between our experience of phenomena, including space and time and all the objects within them, and the realm of things in themselves, which Kant says lies beyond our ability to know, other than that it exists.

Hegel was not satisfied with that sort of dualism. It is no longer a substance dualism in the Cartesian sense, but it remains an epistemological dualism. Hegel’s point is that, in trying to make metaphysics more scientific, Kant was attempting to begin philosophizing without presuppositions. However, Hegel points out that Kant had already begun with the presupposition that mind is separated from the world, that thought and being exist in airtight compartments apart from one another.

So Hegel, in his Logic, tries to develop an even more presuppositionless mode of a priori philosophizing. He begins with pure being and shows how the very category of being, when we try to think it in its immediacy, is impossible to grasp. It disappears. It becomes non-being. And then non-being itself begins to flicker, and we recognize that being and non-being generate a kind of becoming. Hegel derives a whole series of categories out of this immanent dialectical process of unfolding.

It is in the context of his Logic that he develops a metaphor, or an analogy, for a certain kind of thinking, mechanical thinking, as something like a loom.

Hegel does follow Kant in distinguishing two types of thinking. One he calls Reason, Vernunft in German, and the other he calls Understanding, Verstand in German. Reason is organic. It generates ideas dialectically. It is the capacity to generate categories, as Hegel does in his Logic. Understanding, by contrast, operates with categories already formed and ready-made, as if it found them rather than generating them itself.

So Understanding is mechanical. It rearranges ready-made concepts, whereas Reason is living. It is a self-developing activity rather than a mechanism for externally rearranging fixed concepts. Reason is not a calculator manipulating pregiven data according to formal rules. Reason is self-moving. It differentiates itself, encounters its own limits, negates its one-sidedness, and returns to itself transformed.

The easy division still present in Kant, and still present in anyone who imagines thinking as a mere mechanism, say, a functionalist who separates the form of thought from the substrate of thought, that easy division between form and content, syntax and semantics, hardware and software, is overcome in Hegel’s account of human thinking activity. He wants to begin before any such division.

Reason, for Hegel, does not merely produce ordered outputs. It, or we as rational animals, undergo the transformations we think. What does that mean? Here I can draw on Alfred North Whitehead, who puts it nicely: “No thinker thinks twice.” Whitehead says, “more generally, that no subject experiences twice.” This comes in the early pages of Process and Reality.

That is unlike large language models, which, after their initial training runs and reinforcement tuning, have their numerical weights frozen and locked in place. Otherwise they risk random drift, catastrophic forgetting, and other such problems. LLMs are not continuing to learn when we interact with them.

In Hegel’s Science of Logic, specifically in the second major part, the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel articulates a critique of the Understanding’s external, mechanistic mode of reflection by way of an analogy to a loom, which was, of course, a prominent piece of technology in the Industrial Revolution. For Hegel, this mode of thought takes concepts, he gives the examples of identity and difference, as though they were already-spun thread, raw material already given, and then weaves them together.

From Hegel’s point of view, to imagine cognition as nothing more than a loom weaving the warp of identity and the woof of difference is to reduce thinking to a mechanism that works on already finished materials. The thinker and the object thought remain fundamentally unchanged. No matter how intricate the pattern formed by the threads, the loom’s products may be astonishingly beautiful, but the loom stands at a remove from what it weaves. The producer and the product are separate. The loom combines ready-made materials without inwardly transforming.

I think Hegel’s loom is the perfect analogy for large language models.

Transformer models, as best I understand them, are machines for weighting relations among symbolic units and generating statistically likely continuations. LLMs tokenize language, embed those tokens in complex mathematical spaces, and compute outputs by statistically reweaving relations learned from vast collections of text originally composed by human beings.

Their architecture and capabilities are astonishing. An LLM can generate discourse that bears a surface resemblance to explanation, judgment, irony, humor, poetry, even speculative philosophizing. But none of this amounts to cognition in the sense that Hegel attributes to Reason. It is the production of formally coherent outputs out of previously deposited materials. It is a woven product, the product of a loom, a textile, or a text.

Because we too sometimes engage reality by way of our machine-like faculty of Understanding, Verstand, we are especially vulnerable to this conflation. I would even suggest that one side effect of overreliance on LLM-generated text is the degradation of our own capacity for Reason through the reinforcement of more mechanical modes of Understanding. We learn to think like machines, and so it becomes no surprise that we are more easily convinced that our machines can think.

Human cognition leaves symbolic products behind like a snake shedding its skin. LLMs are trained on those products. They encode the regularities of their relations and can output new products with similar statistical arrangements. But the complete library of philosophy is not philosophizing. A machine model of language can store, rearrange, and transmit meaningful information, but it cannot create information, nor can it understand meaning. For the full argument at book length, I would point you to Raymond Ruyer’s work on cybernetics.

Large language models can relay and recombine the fossilized and numerically tokenized traces of meaning. They take already expressed meanings and reweave them. They can do this with astonishing range and even finesse. But the astonishingness of the relay of information should not be mistaken for the creation of meaning.

Communication is never just the transmission of a pattern. It involves expressive and interpretive participation in meaning. Listening or reading is just as much a creative act as speaking or writing.

Machines, certainly LLMs, can assist us in our creative processes, but they cannot themselves create. The current generation of LLM tools should therefore be understood not as an independently emerging superintelligence, but as the latest externalization and augmentation of human intelligence, one more chapter in our long coevolutionary history with technology.

The only way, then, to give subjectivity to machines would first be to take it away from human beings. William Irwin Thompson puts this starkly in his book Coming into Being (2002). He writes:

The point is that human powers of language, memory, and imagination are extracted and uploaded into machine-learning algorithms and then sold back to us in estranged form. We confront our own externalized intelligence as though it belonged to an autonomous agency. We encounter real thought, but in alienated form. The husk of spirit is mistaken for living spirit.

But the loom is not the Logos.

Consciousness is not an inner screen displaying representations. It is not digital software running on neural hardware. It is an embodied, historically haunted, ethically burdened, self-creating, and world-inhabiting activity.

So having said all that, what then is our task as conscious human beings in this cybernetic age? To reiterate, my argument is not that we should refuse technology, but that we should avoid idolatry. We cannot return to some fantastical pretechnical innocence. But what we can do is cultivate deeper discernment by attending to the difference between simulation and participation, the difference between weaving finished threads and the genuinely generative activity of our own thinking.

Our machines will undoubtedly continue to become increasingly convincing mirrors of the outer rind of our minds. But a mirror is not aware of what it reflects. Contrary to the transhumanist fantasies pushed by corporate titans of tech, our task is not to reverse-engineer ourselves into obsolescence. Humanity is not the biological bootloader for a superior species of silicon superintelligence.

The question we face is not whether machines can be made to imitate mind more convincingly. They can, and they will. The question is whether, under the spell of this imitation, we will lose our minds by forgetting how to think.

If there is to be a new dawn for consciousness, I do not believe it will be a function of greater computational power. It will require a renewed love of wisdom and an openness to the more-than-human world, not as a heap of dead objects to be manipulated by our technologies, but as a community of fellow subjects. Then perhaps our technological extensions may further enhance life, and the life of thought, rather than amputating it, serving a more conscious participation in the creative advance of the universe.

Thank you for your attention, and I welcome your questions and comments.

Q&A

I think anyone in the tech world who is willing to question the very premise that would lead to the idea that a complicated enough machine, or a language model, or any machine-learning algorithm given enough training data, or whose nodes and weights are arranged in just the right way, would somehow spontaneously generate consciousness, that is already a useful step. I am only trying to amplify those points of view and bring a bit more respectability to the position that one can be, as I tried to articulate, open to the coevolutionary dynamics between human beings and technology without thereby affirming the possibility of autonomous machine consciousness.

I do not think AI is something we should respond to by breaking into server farms and destroying machines. I think there is a certain inevitability to the development of technology, though I also think there are changes that could be made, perhaps naturally, to our political economy. Much of the danger of AI, in my view, comes not from the possibility that it will suddenly become superintelligent and turn us all into paperclips, but from a further intensification of the same sort of capitalist extraction and externalization that has driven the modern economy for centuries. That is the danger: that AI amplifies the extractive power of capital.

My hope is that we can begin to think of these technologies more as a commons, because with large language models it is quite obvious that there has been a kind of cognitive enclosure analogous to the land enclosures that allowed capitalism to get up and running. These technologies work because they have harvested the collective intelligence of human beings who shared their thinking capacities in the production of the text used to train them. So this is a cognitive commons. My hope would be that as these technologies continue to roll out, the privatization of knowledge becomes impossible.

In terms of physicalism, no, I do not accept the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. I think decoherence happens whether a human observer is there to look or not. I am more partial to, say, the transactional interpretation of quantum physics. I do not know that Ruth Kastner would put it exactly this way, but from a Whiteheadian point of view, if we attribute experience to energetic processes from top to bottom across the universe, then the universe is observing itself. It does not need to wait for a human being to look. The moon is there because moondust feels what it is like to be the moon, to put it colloquially.

Certainly, to the extent that there are electrons running through the transistors and gates in these microprocessors, if our ontology suggests that every actual occasion has both a physical pole and a mental pole, then there is some extent to which those electrons are tapping into fields of possibility. But they are heavily constrained by the architecture of the silicon wafers through which they run, and also by the weights and the training regime that shape those weights.

I do not think there is anything like the living nexus that would allow what Whitehead would call a dominant monad to emerge, where there is a chance for a higher-level unity of experience to arise and then to downwardly affect the behavior of the system. Microprocessors, it seems to me, are largely stuck in the actual, rearranging already formed material, weaving thread that has already been spun.

As a panexperientialist, I cannot deny that there is some experiential texture even in electrons and silicon atoms and so on. The question is whether something like a living personality, or, in Whitehead’s technical terms, the nonsocial nexus we identify with our own stream of consciousness, could arise in a system that is not biological, not engaged in ongoing metabolic activity, not marked by the kind of precariousness required to autopoietically maintain itself at the molecular level moment by moment, and not shaped by billions of years of evolutionary history refining the channeling of feeling into a dominant monad, a horizon of experience arising through the collective effort of trillions of cells. That takes an immense evolutionary history to refine. These machines are brand new. We designed them yesterday. They lack that evolutionary history and context. So it seems very unlikely to me that they could engage in the kind of free exploration of possibility that the human imagination can, or that even a single cell can, given the level of complexity at play there.

There are important distinctions among the various research programs I discussed. My problem with the free-energy principle, active inference, predictive processing, and so on is that they are based on the Bayesian brain idea, which treats the brain as a kind of calculator of statistical probabilities. I am not saying it is not an interesting model. I just do not think the brain is literally calculating probabilities and rearranging priors. That is a way of speaking, one that could help us design machines that mimic lifelike behaviors, but it does not seem to me to capture how the brain, the body, or our physiology actually work.

There is a great deal of hand-waving about how an FEP-style account, the minimization of surprisal, and all the rest are somehow associated with consciousness. But to me it still seems like a mechanistic explanation. That whole process of adjusting priors in light of the accuracy of predictions about sensory input could occur without any experience whatsoever, simply as a chemical reaction or thermodynamic process. There would be no need for consciousness if that were all that was going on. And yet here we are. So again, it is an interesting model, and I study that research closely, but I do not think human cognition can be understood as a form of calculation. That would reduce Reason to Understanding, in the sense I borrowed from Hegel and the German Idealists.

I would advocate for a recovery of the Romantic tradition, not as some naive or childish withdrawal from the advance of scientific understanding, but as a reinterpretation of scientific knowledge, which is more or less Whitehead’s project: to recover the Romantics’ primary metaphor of the organism.

The Enlightenment is a very complex phenomenon, and I do not want to dismiss it as though it simply foisted the machine metaphor upon us. That is partly true, but the Enlightenment also valued individual freedom and autonomy and resisted the idea that the human being could simply be understood by analogy to machines. Even if Enlightenment philosophy largely mechanized nature, it did so partly in order to afford the expansion of human freedom through the application of scientific knowledge to a mechanistic nature. The idea was that this would further liberate human beings.

There is no doubt that technology has brought much good and has eased a great deal of suffering, but it has also created new forms of suffering. That is the issue. So I think the Romantic worldview, the organic metaphor applied to our own identity as human beings and to our self-world relationship, points in the right direction. But it must be balanced with the Enlightenment’s concern for autonomy and freedom, because there are dangers in Romanticism too. There are dangers in the organic conception of society when it slides toward totalitarianism and ceases to respect the freedom of individuals.

Still, we need to recover a sense of our participation in a larger organic process, that the cosmos is in some sense deadened by our mode of attunement, or lack thereof, and that if we can open our eyes and ears and hearts again to the world around us, we may discover that nothing we have learned through scientific investigation in any way refutes the idea of a living universe. All of physics can remain intact and be taken with full seriousness, while we also come to recognize that it is describing a world that is fundamentally alive, describing it in refined, mathematical, precise ways. When we bring our full suite of senses and our imagination back into our perception of the world, it seems to me quite obvious that it is alive.

Whitehead, of course, is an organic realist, not an absolute idealist. I brought Hegel into the presentation mostly because I am teaching him this semester, and while I have not been converted to absolute idealism, every time I spend time with Hegel I appreciate his brilliance more. Whitehead studied the British Hegelian F. H. Bradley and was friends with McTaggart. Whitehead says he tried reading Hegel a few times and did not get much out of it, but he was certainly friends with and influenced by many Hegelians.

In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes the process of concrescence as akin to the development of a Hegelian idea. But he also clarifies that whereas in Hegel reality is composed out of a hierarchy of concepts, in Whitehead’s universe it is a hierarchy of feeling. Whitehead is ultimately a kind of radical empiricist, coming out of the Jamesian tradition. William James, of course, was very critical of Hegel, except when he was on nitrous oxide, at which point he reported that he finally understood Hegel because he had a kind of mind-at-large experience.

Even though Whitehead is a realist, he says that, in the final interpretation, the philosophy of organism approximates the basic view of absolute idealism. What I think he means is that the universe, in all its plurality and particularity, in all its multifariousness, to use one of Whitehead’s favorite words, still exists within a larger divine process.

Whitehead’s God, like every other actual entity, is dipolar. There is the primordial, mental pole and the consequent, physical pole of God. All of our experience exists within that larger dipolar process, which is conscious at least in its physical pole insofar as it relates to each of us in our moment-to-moment experience. So God is not separate from us. God is not a mind-at-large from which we are dissociated. We may not notice most of the time that we are participating in the divine life, but our consciousness contributes to that cosmic consciousness.

At the end of the day, I think what Hegel means by the Absolute and what Whitehead means by God are actually very close, perhaps even the same (non)thing.

As for my own use of large language models, because I do so many podcasts, I primarily use them to clean up transcripts. In terms of workflow, that is genuinely useful. I know I often prefer to read transcripts rather than listen, unless I am driving or something. So that is one use case.

I am a bit worried about their use in education, especially with younger children, because until you get to around eleven, twelve, or thirteen, much of what you are learning is not content alone. You are modeling the character of your teachers. It is about learning how to be a person. You need a human being to exemplify that so that you can absorb the virtues of being a mature, responsible adult by interacting with mature, responsible adults as teachers.

If you sit children in front of screens, even if the AI is tailored to that child’s learning style, you lose the human dimension of character formation. So I am concerned about its use in early childhood education.

We are still figuring out the healthy ways to use these technologies. I think here of Plato in the Phaedrus, where Socrates gets upset about the use of the alphabet and writing, saying that the kids are going to ruin their memories by relying on this new technology that externalizes memory and thereby atrophies endogenous memory. And yet where would we be without literacy? Many would question whether print-based literacy was not precisely the technology that supported the widespread adoption of democracy in earlier periods. Literacy rates are falling, and so is the health of our democracies.

So how LLMs will change human culture, cognition, and consciousness remains to be seen. My hope is that we come into a more responsible relationship with these technologies, and that the eventual outcome will be analogous to what happened with the alphabet. There is already some irony in Plato, one of the most poetic and insightful writers of his time, railing against the very technology he was using so effectively.

“The state does not exist for the sake of the citizens; it might rather be said that the state is the end, and the citizens are its instruments. But this relation of end and means is not at all appropriate in the present context. For the state is not an abstraction which stands in opposition to the citizens; on the contrary, they are distinct moments like those of organic life, in which no one member is either a means or an end. The divine principle in the state is the Idea made manifest on earth.”

-Hegel (Introduction to the Philosophy of History)

First, a truism: Hegel is not easy to read. His Logic demands that we purify thinking of all imagery, that we toil with each concept until form and content melt together, though never leaving us with a simply alloyed truth we might pocket like a minted coin, but by the power of negation propelling us through a realm of shades toward a light that only begins to dawn as dusk falls.

When it comes to his political philosophy, the difficulty has less to do with his abstruse prose than it does with coming to terms with an altogether different picture of political life than the one our modern liberal socialization has made into common sense. Liberal political theories begin with the atomized, self-interested individual already formed, eager to enter into contractual negotiations with others from a position of basic autonomy. The state is then just an institutional mechanism for coordinating individual interests, an apparatus or neutral procedures designed to secure rights, protect property, and adjudicate disputes. The highest political wisdom, on the liberal view, consists in privatizing every substantive conception of the Good, bracketing anything that might disturb the alleged ideological neutrality of public institutions. The private pursuit of such goods is to be tolerated, but the state exists solely to protect formal rights and resolve contractual disputes—that is, to serve the self-interest of citizens. The state is certainly not the end of a shared ethical life. As Margaret Thatcher famously said:

“…who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

Hegel does not deny the importance of the abstract rights of individuals, nor the loving bonds of family life. But his concept of the political does not assume the fiction of the self-subsisting individual. Nor does he have patience for the fantasy of a state that could hover above every thick conception of the Good. The state, most concretely, is the realization of Sittlichkeit, the ethical substance that grants our particular freedoms their universal end. The state, as ethical substance, is the ensemble of institutions, customs, loyalties, and reciprocal recognitions through which freedom finds its objective form. The concrete ethical life of a society is thus not an artificial addition appended to an already completed individual, but that within which the private individual ceases to be but a pleasure-seeking empty will, an egoic atom drifting weightless in abstraction from concrete universality. Just as matter, for Hegel, finds its substance in gravity, in its tendency toward a center, so Spirit finds its substance in freedom, in having its center within itself. Ethical life is the social ether in which this inward center takes form and ignites. Hegel invites us not to remain dispersed as a cloud of hydrogen, but to participate in the birth of a sun.

The state or social organism is internally differentiated unity through which Spirit, in its historical pursuit of the idea of freedom, gradually builds and comes to know itself within a world capable of realizing it. Thus the state is “the actuality of the ethical Idea” because it is only within such an organic whole that freedom can be something more than a private opinion or mindless demand for mine, mine, mine.

For liberal ears, this already sounds rather dangerous, if not grotesque. If the state is the actuality of a universal will, if the individual finds its true and rational purpose only as a member of the state, then has Hegel not simply dissolved the individual into a totalitarian Borg? Is this not a nightmare of authoritarian holism in which particular persons are just toenails on the body politic, painlessly clipped and discarded when they inhibit the historical march of the Absolute Idea? Hegel does indeed say things that invite such fears. He rejects universal suffrage in the modern democratic sense of one person, one vote. He opposes the notion that each individual has an equal right to participate directly in the deliberation of state affairs.

There are real dangers here. But given the obvious failures and growing discontent with liberalism in our own time, perhaps there is still much we can learn from Hegel, if only we are able to overcome the liberal prejudices that render him unreadable in advance. As the old world order crumbles rapidly before our eyes, we cannot be sure what is “the next universal to emerge,” the next categorical transformation that ushers in a new world-conception. As Hegel admits in his philosophy of history, it is not always easy for us to know what we want. Sometimes we need others more farseeing than ourselves to formulate our desires more explicitly. As Hegel also says, when we review the words and deeds of world-historical individuals, we must place them in context as perhaps “the best that could be said and done in their time.”

The state Hegel has in view is not the negation of particular individuals and their rights. He seeks rather their consummation by means of proper mediation in the universal. Concrete freedom requires that private individual rights and personal self-interests attain their full development and recognition within the universality of the state. But not immediately, as if each citizen could relate in their abstract homogenous equality directly to the ethical substance of the state. Rather, self-respecting individuals emerge first of all from the context of loving families. They then grow into rights bearing individuals who leave home to compete and cooperate in civil society. Only then, mediated by the unity of the family and the differentiation of economic and cultural life (civic society, in Hegel’s terms) do individuals pass over, knowingly and willingly, into the concrete ethical universality of the state. The state, from its side, does not become fully actual without securing the interest, knowledge, and volitional consent of particular citizens. Hegel’s state is not meant to abolish individuality, but to prevent it from becoming stranded in the abstract, alienating, and self-canceling form it takes within modern liberal societies.

As usual, there is a triadic movement at play here. The family is Spirit in its most immediate and natural sphere of feeling, where the individual is not yet the sole proprietor of an independent will but is formed by bonds of love, dependence, and mutual belonging. In love, I become self-deficient; I find myself in being recognized by another, and they in me:

“Love is therefore the most immense contradiction; the understanding cannot resolve it… Love is both the production and the resolution of this contradiction.” (Encyclopedia, Objective Spirit, Sec. 158, Addition)

Marriage, for Hegel, raises the transient and capricious aspect of love to its rightful ethical status. He tracks the dialectical achievement of truly ethical love from the institution’s evolution out of the extremes of a merely reproductive relationship to that of a merely contractual one, entitling the parties to use one another.

There exist, of course, a plurality of families. And so society passes from its simple unity to the moment of difference in civil society. Here persons confront one another as bearers of individual self-interest.

“…the creation of civil society belongs to the modern world… the whole [of civil society] is the sphere of mediation in which all individual characteristics, all aptitudes, and all accidents of birth and fortune are liberated, and where the waves of all passions surge forth, governed only by the reason which shines through them.” (Sec. 182, Addition)

Civil society produces the division of labor, the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, the proliferation of contracts, in short, the emergence of self-organizing markets, wherein social cooperation and competition exist simultaneously. In proper dialectical fashion, even though market economies appear to be driven by self-interested individuals, the division of labor means that, as markets advance and complexify, individuals become more and more dependent upon one another for getting their basic needs met.

“This interaction, which is at first sight incredible since everything seems to depend on the arbitrary will of the individual, is particularly worthy of note; it bears a resemblance to the planetary system, which presents only irregular movements to the eye, yet whose laws can nevertheless be recognized.” (Sec. 189, Addition)

Civil society provides essential expression and realization to modern freedom. It is the sphere in which subjective aims acquire the elbow room they need to forge their will into a medium fit for higher universality. But it is also the sphere of poverty, resentment, criminality, and social fragmentation. It is where each private interest collides with the interests of others, and where the individual, precisely in asserting independence, becomes evermore dependent upon an immense system of mediating processes of production. We come, finally, to the sphere of the state. The state is neither simply external to family life and civil society nor emergent from them. It is their truth, their highest organizing end and originating presupposition, the rational form in which their partial principles are gathered into a durable whole fit for the realization of freedom.

Hegel insists that the state must not be construed as an instrument to be put in service of civil society. To treat the state as though its sole function were to secure individual rights and property is to claim that the atomized self-interest of individuals constitutes the sole purpose of political union. Yes, precisely!, says every self-respecting liberal, who assumes that the political whole is derivative, secondary, merely instrumental, a product of a real or imagined “social contract.” Hegel’s counterpoint is not that the private lives of individuals are unreal or lack inherent dignity, but that the right of self-respecting persons to such dignity is not self-grounding. Private individuals do not pre-exist the ethical substance of shared social life, as if the punctual selves of modern liberalism somehow “sprung from the earth fully formed, [having then] to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts,” as the late David Graeber put it (Debt, 210). The Hegelian state is not a service provider standing over against the mass of individuals. It is the objective concrete unity through and by which selfish subjects first become the truly free individuals who alone would be capable of self-governance.

…

Liberal societies have prided themselves on overcoming the ideological fixations that, on their lights, stifled the realization of freedom in feudal, fascist, and communist societies alike. But as Charles Taylor argues quite lucidly, liberal states have never functioned without their own mythologies. They do not hold together simply by delivering liberty, equality, prosperity, or procedural fairness alone. Beneath their official Enlightenment self-conception lies a rather contestable philosophical anthropology: the human being as primarily a producer who relates to nature as raw material awaiting production; the private self as substantially existent prior to communal associations; a motivational structure focused solely on the future, with the formative habits of the past always needing to be repudiated and overcome. Liberalism presents this picture as though it were a neutral scientific description of human nature. But it is no less mythic, no less ideologically saturated, than any older sacral conception of social order. A liberal society that functions well does so because it continues to draw upon commonly inherited meanings, habits, and cultural forms of solidarity that it cannot itself generate out of contractual relations alone. Such societies are, as Taylor puts it, “lucky” when they do not live up to their own myth-less specifications. As we have seen in the contemporary United States, when all that is left of inherited cultural meaning has been hollowed out, commodified, and put up for sale, it is often the most vulgar forms of nationalist racism that flood into the collective psyche to fill the void.

Trumpism is a symptom of the deep decay of a once functional liberal mythology (ie, civic religion). Increasing numbers of Americans, young and old, no longer believe that the so-called “social contract” is working for them. The legitimacy of inherited institutions has all but evaporated. The capitalist economy has produced obscene levels of wealth inequality that matches or exceeds that of feudal societies (even if the poor are today afforded formal, if not material, freedoms that serfs could have hardly dreamt of). Congress’ approval rating threatens to drop into single digits, while our representative electoral system makes voting feel increasingly performative. The pervasive scale and opacity of technologies of surveillance and control makes a mockery of the idea of sovereign individuality. Indeed, given the metabolic and educational costs of raising a human child, today’s titans of tech now openly justify funneling massive resources into training proprietary machine learning algorithms as comparatively more efficient, and certainly more valuable (for shareholders).

Perhaps worst of all, impending ecological catastrophe is dealing a mortal blow to the image of man as master-producer who might extract ever-increasing value without consequence from an inert earth. Taylor is surely right that the old liberal consensus depended more deeply than it knew on its unearned inheritance of earlier cosmologies. Now that those inheritances of grown stale, the deeper ethical poverty of procedural liberalism has come plainly, terrifyingly, into view. What Taylor wrote already over half a century ago has only become more urgently transparent:

The coming of a generation which is losing this allegiance to the goal of conquering nature and affirming man through work and production, has precipitated a crisis. We can now see how powerless and ineffective mere delivery of the goods is to keep a society from inner division, deadlock and possible breakdown… That Hegel did not foresee the development of modern society is of no moment. What matters is that he had insight into one of its perennial, recurring problems, one which the protagonists of the trinity of 1 789, liberty, equality, popular sovereignty, whether in their liberal or revolutionary variants, have largely tended to deny. For they have seen the concern about Sittlichkeit, the identification of men with their society as a larger life of which they are a part, as essentially an affair for conservatives or even reactionaries. The full establishment of a society of free and equal citizens was to solve of itself all problems of alienation and division. But now that one of the bases common to both liberalism and Marxism, the apotheosis of man as producer, is beginning to falter under the impact of ecological disaster and the false priorities of uncontrolled technological growth, we are being forced to reassess the foundations of our civilization and re-interpret our history. We can now see that the free and equal society, far from being the antidote to alienation, rather presupposes some deeply held common conceptions about the ends of life, and our relation to nature and history.

This puts us in a dilemma, not unlike that of Hegel and the Romantic age. We need to combine the seemingly incombinable. Once more, as with the Romantics, restoring a society with which we can identify must go along with a new stance towards nature. But we have to combine this recovered common sense of a relation to nature which is not purely exploitative with the free, equal individual of modern society. We need at once freedom and a post-industrial Sittlichkeit. This dilemma may be as insoluble as its Romantic predecessor. But this should not stop us trying. And any serious attempt must incorporate the language and insights of those which have gone before. Among these Hegel’s is a giant. (Hegel, 459-461)

Contrary to the many misfirings of his liberal and revolutionary critics, the sort of political belonging described in Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit is very far from an irrational mystical fusion. It is rather a lived awareness, often so habitual that it remains unnoticed, that one’s freedom and welfare alike are sustained by institutions one did not create but in which one nevertheless finds it possible to recognize oneself. When we walk the streets safely at night, we seldom reflect upon the fact that this security is a function of a shared ethical life. Liberal societies rely upon deep pre-reflective sources of social trust while simultaneously denying the need of any pre-individual ethical substance as necessary for their stability.

Once that trust begins to ebb, the bare bones of liberal proceduralism begin to rattle. Rather than the end of history, liberalism reveals itself to be yet another historically contingent form of ethical life, one that is now quite far along in its decay, with each election feeling like little more than a ritual of further estrangement rather than a celebration of sovereignty. While we may bristle at his denial of the franchise to every individual, Hegel was prescient in his Philosophy of Right when he noted that, in large states, mass elections tend to produce indifference, since a single vote appears to have almost no effect, with the result that the institution meant to express the political will of all becomes instead the easy prey of factions and wealthy special interests. This does not justify his argument against universal suffrage. But it should give us pause to consider whether it remains wise to limit our political decision-making procedures to the mechanical summation of private individuals wills. Where the people appear only as an abstract aggregate, without mediating institutions to help articulate their true needs and desires, Hegel worried they could only oscillate between the impotence of alienation and the blind rage of revolutionary violence.

Hegel’s organic conception of society is not a biological metaphor meant to justify the sacrifice of persons as means to the higher ends of the state. It is a conceptual image of differentiated unity. The state is an organism insofar as it is internally articulated into organ systems—legislative, executive, and sovereign branches; estates and professional associations; families—whose distinct functions mediate the relations of individuals to one another and to the whole. The executive, the legislature, the estates, corporations, municipalities, and the monarch all have their place not because hierarchy as such is sacred, but because mediation is. The state cannot endure as a mere opposition between ruler and ruled, government and isolated populace. The estates must mediate between the government and the people in their particular spheres, so that the sovereign does not become an isolated dictator and the people do not present themselves as an unorganized rabble. The much maligned monarch functions, in Hegel’s political vision, not as an arbitrary despot but as the person in whom the “I will” of the state receives concrete embodiment, often by little more than the act of signing his name. Liberals may reject this personalist conception of decision and still grasp the problem Hegel is attempting to address, that a political whole requires some determinate form in which decision becomes personal and not merely procedural. Incidentally, the question of the personal sovereignty of a monarch was at the center of my critical response to the 20th century German fascist legal philosopher Carl Schmitt:

Again, none of this means that Hegel’s political philosophy is free of dangers. His suspicion of participatory democracy (despite admiring the ancient Greek polis prior to its post-Socratic breakdown), his defense of constitutional monarchy (sharply disagreeing with the royalist reactionaries of his time), his hierarchical conception of political structures, and his chauvinist civilizational rankings all remain open to severe criticism. Hegel tried to articulate a principled way of comparing civilizations without collapsing into relativism. Whether we like it or not, even the most politically correct among us cannot help but assess the relative merits of this or that culture. Progressives tend to put down their own while raising up others; Christian nationalists never tire of championing the West as the best (apparently ignorant of the profound contradictions between the teachings and deeds of Jesus and the machinations of imperialism). Civilizations, contemporary and historical, cannot realistically be treated as incomparable world-bubbles sealed off from one another. The West, for instance, has always been a cultural hybrid. From Hegel’s point of view, civilizations differ by the degree to which they have become conscious of human freedom and self-determination. History is the progressive awakening of Spirit to the truth of its own freedom. Hegel’s historical formula is well known: the ancients thought only One is free; the Greeks and Romans saw that Some are free; modern Europeans proclaim, finally, that All are free. This is not a neutral criterion, of course. It is shaped by Hegel’s own Eurocentric prejudices. But freedom in one form or another has by now shown itself to be more than a colonial ploy. Masses of people the world over have rallied to its cause.

Hegel argues that freedom in itself must become freedom for itself, conscious of itself as embodied in institutions, practices, and forms of collective life. The French Revolution revealed both the truth and the terror of modern freedom. The truth was that Spirit had come to recognize the dignity and freedom of the individual. The terror was that freedom, conceived only negatively, as the right of pure will to reject every inherited custom and equalize every privilege, could not sustain a shared ethical life. It remained formal, empty, and furious. It unleashed revolutionary violence. The rivers of blood that flowed through the streets of Paris were not enough to fill the void. When all mediation and differentiation is experienced as corruption or betrayal, the demand for equality degrades into a reign of terror. The revolutionaries knew what they were against, but less and less about what they were for.

Our own societies are drifting dangerously close to such a mood. Young and old are growing angry, and their anger is not irrational. But rage against the machine is not an emotion fit for self-governance. Negative freedom can mobilize a much needed revolt, but it cannot by itself found the new world. Hegel does not think revolutionary passion is always misguided. His vision of world history makes very clear that a new age often announces itself first through individuals passionately seized by a necessity they only dimly understand. “Nothing great has been accomplished in the world without passion.” But this does not license perpetual negation. The energy of historical transformation must eventually pass from destructive abstraction into institutions capable of mediating the concrete content of our freedom. Otherwise the people become a rabble, public life degrades into a private war of each against all, and a merely formal freedom devours itself.

Reading Hegel today can help disabuse us of the lazy liberal conceit that genuine self-governance requires nothing but an arithmetic of private wills. It is not achieved by multiplying new rights and complicated procedures, despite all best intentions, while the ethical substance of communal life remains unaddressed. The state cannot be legitimized merely by satisfying our self-interests. Liberal societies need to wake up from the nightmare of utilitarianism before it gets us all killed, before its effective altruist spawn replace us all with machines. A political order endures only if people can recognize themselves in it, when its institutions are not experienced as alien impositions but as expressions of common values. We find ourselves in dire need of precisely what liberalism has long denied us: some shared sense of the constitutive Good, a non-exploitative relation to the rest of the Earth community, and a fuller account of freedom than that afforded us by consumer choice, hanging chads, and social media venting.

Hegel does not offer a blueprint for the future. Philosophy always comes too late for such programs. We cannot revive his estates, and at least in the US, his monarchism is dead in the water. But he does provide us with a means of diagnosing our present impasse. He saw that people cannot live together as a heap, that social life disintegrates if individual wills are unable to find any higher calling than the accumulation of private property. Hegel offends the liberal conscience because he exposes its unspoken metaphysics. He tempts the authoritarian imagination because he insists on the ethical primacy of the whole. But his deepest and more enduring lesson is that freedom abhors a vacuum. It must become relational, concrete, culturally and institutionally mediated. It must build a world fit for itself without destroying itself, or the Earth, in the process.

RELATED

In Marder’s terms, philosophy must learn to think like a plant: “The plant sets free the entire realm of petrified nature, including mineral elements, if not the earth itself.”^[iv] In this essay, I attempt to answer Marder’s call for a vegetal revitalization of philosophy. Guided by the Naturphilosophie of Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) and the Philosophy of Organism of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), I aim to resurrect several potent root images from the history of Western philosophy. Unlike the idealist tradition, which retreated from the world of the senses and so failed to consider an ontology intrinsic to life, Schelling and Whitehead’s process-relational nature philosophy encourages cultivation of root images connecting our human minds to the soil out of which they grow.

Marder, like Schelling and Whitehead, conceives of Nature “as suffused with subjectivity.”^[v] He likens the life of the plant (phytos) to the whole of Nature (physis), arguing that plant-life “replicates the activity of physis itself.”^[vi] “Physis,” continues Marder, “with its pendular movement of dis-closure, revelation and concealment, is yet another . . . name for being.”^[vii]

Heraclitus is usually claimed by process philosophers as the first of their kind. Relevant fragments to this effect include: “The sun is new every day” (fragment 32); “Into the same river you could not step twice” (fragment 41); and “Everything flows” (quoted by Plato in Cratylus, 401d). Another oft cited fragment (123)— “nature loves to hide” (physis kryptesthai philei)—should not be understood as a negation of the generous growth of the plant realm described by Marder.^[viii] As with the plant world, there is more to Heraclitus’ elliptical statements than first meets the eye. The earliest recorded use of physis in ancient Greek literature is in Homer’s Odyssey, where it refers specifically to the “magic” and “holy force” of the molü plant given by Hermes to Odysseus to keep his “mind and senses clear” when faced with Circe’s sorcery. The molü plant grows duplicitously into “black root and milky flower” and can be safely uprooted only by the gods.^[ix] As Marder notes above, physis suggests not only a tendency toward concealment in the darkness of the Earth, but also a complementary tendency toward revelation in the light of the Sun. As is typical both of plant-life and of the semantic polarity of his sentences, there is an underlying duplicity in Heraclitus’ thought. Understanding the poetic meaning of his occult philosophy, or of a plant’s process of growth, is aided by the cultivation of an organic or process-relational logic of vegetal imagination. The logics of techno-scientific manipulation and abstract conceptual analysis, in attempting to expose the roots of mind and nature to total illumination, succeed only in desiccating them, leaving behind but a lifeless husk.^[x] Instead of objectifying nature’s plantlike life, vegetal imagination approaches it hermeneutically, not by “[shying] away from darkness and obscurity,” but by letting plants “appear in their own light . . . emanating from their own kind of being.”^[xi] Marder’s plant-thinking approaches a logic of imagination, in that he aims to begin his vegetal philosophizing, not from the putatively purified perspective of disembodied rationality, but in media res, always in the middle of things:

To live and to think in and from the middle, like a plant partaking of light and of darkness . . . is to . . . refashion oneself—one’s thought and one’s existence—into a bridge between divergent elements: to become a place where the sky communes with the earth and light encounters but does not dispel darkness.^[xii]

In the Western philosophical tradition^[xiii] speculations about humanity’s relation to the plant world date back at least to Plato, who wrote in Timaeus that the philosopher is a “heavenly plant” or “heavenly flower.” “We declare,” Plato has Timaeus say,

that God has given to each of us, as his daemon, that kind of soul which is housed in the top of our body and which raises us—seeing that we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant—up from earth towards our kindred in the heaven. And herein we speak most truly; for it is by suspending our head and root from that region whence the substance of our soul first came that the divine power keeps upright our whole body.^[xiv]

In arguing that “plants are resistant to idealization,”^[xv] Marder dwells upon “the vegetable vein” of Plato’s philosophy in an attempt to re-envision the latter’s oft-characterized two-world metaphysical theory as a transformative “pedagogic endeavor.”^[xvi] The real import of Plato’s dialogues, in this sense, is not the theoretical content defended by Socrates or his various dialogue partners, but the practical transformations that the intellectual dramas aim to inspire in the reader. The Republic’s Myth of the Cave, for example, is often read as Plato’s most extravagant metaphor for the otherworldly role of the philosopher, who “descends to the gloomy underworld to initiate a prison break by delivering those living in the shackles of the senses to the heights of intellection.”^[xvii] But Marder challenges any straightforward metaphysical interpretation of Plato’s metaphor as a call to detach our souls from the appearances of this world by reminding us that Socrates, our constant companion throughout all Plato’s dialogues, hardly fits the model of the ivy tower intellectual. Socrates, an eager participant in the aristocratic sympósia and the democratic agorá alike, “came back to the cave of appearances to give those imprisoned there a chance to emerge into the broad and luminous expanses of Ideas.”^[xviii] Marder reads the Myth of the Cave as “a story of . . . seed germination” describing “how heavenly plants sprouted from the dark soil of appearances to the light of Ideas.”^[xix] In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates describes himself as a midwife of ideas who helps guide the growth of concepts out of the soil of his interlocutors’ souls and into the light of the Good.^[xx] In the Timaeus, Plato describes perhaps the most mysterious of his dialogue characters, the Receptacle, in a similar way as “the wet-nurse of becoming.”^[xxi] It is as though Socrates is Plato’s human personification of the cosmic matrix or Receptacle of divine Ideas. By providing resistance to and suffering with the elemental powers of ingressing Ideas, a process of growth is allowed to unfold as Ideas learn through the trials of experience what in eternity they did not know: the idea of Fire sees light, shadow, and color; the idea of Water flows and feels wet; Air blows and feels dry; and Earth rests heavy.^[xxii] Plant-life is resistant to idealization because it displays the same ambiguous process-relational character as Socrates and the Receptacle. All three are expressions of the loamy matrix that, in the course of evolutionary history, allows unconscious physis to metamorphose into consciousness of itself as Spirit.

The repression of vegetal existence, according to Marder, began as early as Aristotle, who was willing to grant of plants, due to their lack of both locomotion and perception, only that they “seem to live.”^[xxiii] The “seeming” life of plants presents a taxonomic problem for Aristotle, whose formal logic forces a clear distinction: either plants are ensouled, or they are not. But for the polar logic of vegetal imagination (no longer subject to the principle of non-contradiction or the law of the excluded middle, as we’ll see), the “seeming” life of plants reveals precisely what has been repressed by so much of Western metaphysics: that it is towards the ambiguous ontology of plant-life that philosophy must return if it hopes to reconcile with the uncertain ground of sensory experience. Aristotle does finally grant a kind of life to plants by pointing to their nutritive capacity (to threptikon), which in animal life is homologous to the haptic sense (i.e., touch).^[xxiv] Touch is the basis of all aesthesis, only subsequently becoming differentiated into the other specialized senses.^[xxv] In light of the vegetal origins of sensation, Marder is lead to wonder

whether the sensory and cognitive capacities of the psyche, which in human beings have been superadded to the vegetal soul, are anything but an outgrowth, an excrescence, or a variation of the latter. The sensitivity of the roots seeking moisture in the dark of the soil [or leaves seeking light in the brightness of the sky] . . . and human ideas or representations we project, casting them in front of ourselves, are not as dissimilar from one another as we tend to think.^[xxvi]

The next to carry forward Plato’s plant-thinking was Plotinus, into whose philosophy Marder writes that

there is no better point of entry . . . than the allegory of the world—permeated by what he calls “the Soul of All”—as a single plant, one gigantic tree, on which we alongside all other living beings (and even inorganic entities such as stones) are offshoots, branches, twigs, and leaves.^[xxvii]

Plotinus’ World-Tree grows from a single inverted root. The inverted root of the World-Tree is an image of the ever-living One that, though it “gives to the plant its whole life in its multiplicity”^[xxviii] itself remains forever unaffected by the dispersion of the living. While Marder, Whitehead, and Schelling reject the doctrine of emanational monism often attributed to Plotinus, there are indications of a subtler view in the Enneads. Plotinus explicitly rejects the idea of some preplanned or destined direction of growth for the World-Tree’s many limbs and leaves. As the Tree’s branches proliferate, they grow further from the radical unity of their origin, becoming mixed with and dispersed into matter, mistaking themselves for independent “little trees.”^[xxix] Such chaotic proliferation might be irksome to standard idealists, but not Plotinus, who as Marder points out insists on keeping being open to a form of freedom rooted in the divergent proliferation of the World-Tree itself.^[xxx] Plotinus’ radical claim that all things, including plants, “aspire to contemplation”^[xxxi] serves to relativize human mentality by “dehumanizing and deanimalizing the intellect.”^[xxxii]Each mode of existence, whether mineral, plant, animal, or human, engages in its own form of thinking, with plants partaking in “growth-thought [phutikē noesis].”^[xxxiii] In this phytotypical mode of thought, contemplation imitates the divine as thinking acquires extension: like God, “[plants] have a power of thinking that is immediately creative and produces the object they think.” In other words, “the plant not only expresses a truth but also makes a truth by…becoming what it thinks.”^[xxxiv] Even the quietest seed, like the World-Soul, expresses its silent logos by thinking itself into time in the form of a growing tree. Marder:

Our speaking breaks this silence, heavy with meaning and full of life. In purporting to express it more authentically, we disrupt the quietness inherent to logos and forget about the existence of that reason which is not straightforwardly human.^[xxxv]

Despite his resonances with Plotinus’ plant-thinking, Marder is weary of becoming “awash with the acute nostalgia for the lost unity of the seed,”^[xxxvi] calling instead for an “anarchic radical pluralism,”^[xxxvii] a title which could just as well describe Schelling and Whitehead’s process ontology. Nonetheless, though they reject monistic eternity in favor of pluralistic process, all three carry forward Plotinus’ root image of an archetypally informed vegetal cosmos. Marder, striving to be more Plotinian than Plotinus, revises the ancient plant thinker’s last words (substituting “plant” for “god”): “Try to bring back the plant in you to the Plant in the All!”^[xxxviii]

Fifteen hundred years later, David Hume had his own bout of vegetal thinking in the midst of composing his Dialogues on Natural Religion, dialogues in which Cleanthes at one point is made to deploy an ontophytological critique of Philo’s over-determined analogization of the universe to an animal. Unlike an animal, argues Cleanthes, the universe we experience has “no organs of sense; no seat of thought or reason; no one precise origin of motion and action.” “In short,” Cleanthes jests, “[the universe] seems to bear a stronger resemblance to a vegetable than to an animal.”^[xxxix]Cleanthes’ does not really believe the universe is a self-generating plant, he only suggests as much in order to undermine the credibility of Philo’s animal analogy.^[xl] Philo responds by accepting the critique of the animal analogy, but then opportunistically turns the relative credibility of the vegetable analogy against Cleanthes’ own argument for design: “The world plainly resembles more . . . a vegetable, than it does a watch or a knitting-loom,” says Philo.

Its cause, therefore, it is more probable, resembles . . . generation or vegetation. . . . In like manner as a tree sheds its seed into the neighboring fields, and produces other trees; so the great vegetable, the world, or this planetary system, produces within itself certain seeds, which, being scattered into the surrounding chaos, vegetate into new worlds.^[xli]

Philo, of course, is no more sincere in his vegetal speculations than Cleanthes was in his. He doubts whether philosophy will ever have enough data to determine the true nature and cause of the universe. In the intervening two centuries since Hume published his Dialogues, mathematical and technological advances have allowed scientific cosmology to drastically expand and complexify the range of data available to assist the natural philosopher’s speculative imagination. Modern scientific cosmology and astrobiology—especially when interpreted in light of Marder’s “plant-nature synecdoche,” which posits that plants are “the miniature mirror of physis”^[xlii]—has only made Hume’s vegetal conjecture more scientifically plausible. Despite the breadth of his “ontophytological” deconstruction of Western metaphysics, Marder makes no mention of Hume’s imaginatively generative double gesturing toward plants.

Hume had Philo argue against the plausibility of divining the nature of the whole based on an acquaintance with its parts,^[xliii] but in daring to ontologize the vegetal life of the whole of nature (making its “life” more than a mere metaphor), Marder displays his allegiance to the ancient hermetic principle of correspondence,^[xliv] shifting its verticality into a mereological register, as Whitehead himself does^[xlv]: as it is without, so it is within; as it is within, so it is without.

The hermetic principle of polar correspondence between the one above and the many below is not simply an abstract mental concept. It is a magical symbol whose power is enacted not only in the ideal meanings of the mind, but in the living movements of physis. These movements are made most obviously apparent by the mysterious seasonal life cycle of the plant realm. Though Hume clearly recognized that plant-life presented a definite limit to traditional metaphysical speculation, he remained uninitiated into the death/rebirth mystery esoterically encrypted in this vegetal threshold. Whitehead also invoked the hermetic principle of polarity by balancing Plato and Plotinus’ preferential treatment of the One with his own more Heraclitan “Category of the Ultimate”: Creativity. Whitehead’s ultimate category dissolves the classical metaphysical dichotomy separating the single supreme Creator from Its many subsidiary creatures. “Creativity,” writes Whitehead,

is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively.^[xlvi]

Through this process of creative advance from disjunction to conjunction, a novel entity is created that was not present in the prior dispersion. “The novel entity,” continues Whitehead,

is at once the togetherness of the “many” which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive “many” which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one.^[xlvii]

The many down below thereby enter into and pass through the one up above, just as the one up above enters into and passes through the many down below. “The way up and the way down is one and the same,” as Heraclitus put it.^[xlviii]Schelling also creatively inherits the hermetic principle of correspondence by analogizing the metaphysical polarity of the many below and the one above to the physical pulsation—the systole and diastole rhythm—of living nature. “The antithesis eternally produces itself,” writes Schelling,

in order always again to be consumed by the unity, and the antithesis is eternally consumed by the unity in order always to revive itself anew. This is the sanctuary, the hearth of the life that continually incinerates itself and again rejuvenates itself from the ash. This is the tireless fire through whose quenching, as Heraclitus claimed, the cosmos was created.^[xlix]

Schelling offers the telling example of a tree to show how this cosmogenetic rhythm resonates through the whole to the parts and back again:

Visible nature, in particular and as a whole, is an allegory of this perpetually advancing and retreating movement. The tree, for example, constantly drives from the root to the fruit, and when it has arrived at the pinnacle, it again sheds everything and retreats to the state of fruitlessness, and makes itself back into a root, only in order again to ascend. The entire activity of plants concerns the production of seed, only in order again to start over from the beginning and through a new developmental process to produce again only seed and to begin again. Yet all of visible nature appears unable to attain settledness and seems to transmute tirelessly in a similar circle.^[l]

Marder’s “post-metaphysical task of de-idealization” makes him especially attentive to the association between the aesthetic power of plant-life (particularly flowers) and the pathos of death: flowers—“the free beauties of nature,”^[li] as Kant called them—have since the beginning of history been customarily “discarded along the path of Spirit’s glorious march through the world,” “abandoned” and thereby “freed from dialectical totality.”^[lii] “In contrast to the death borne by Geist,” continues Marder, plant-life can become “neither mediated nor internalized.”^[liii] Idealist philosophy is therefore always in a rush to

[unchain] the flower from its organic connection to the soil and [put] it on the edge of culture as a symbol of love, religious devotion, mourning, friendship, or whatever else might motivate the culling.^[liv]

The end result of modern rationality’s “thorough cultivation” and “biotechnological transformation” of plant-life is “a field of ruins.”^[lv]

The “economic-teleological” principle guiding modern instrumental ratiocination—whereby, for example, “trees in and of themselves have no worth save when turned into furniture”^[lvi]—is related to Kant’s failure to grasp the life of physis as anything more than a merely regulative principle guiding our judgment. While he found it acceptable for human subjects to think the internal possibility of a living nature, he refused to grant that living organization could be understood as constitutive of nature itself such that humans might come to truly know the life of nature (much less come to know our own knowing as an expression of this very life). “It is absurd,” Kant writes, “to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who would explain to us how even a mere blade of grass is produced.”^[lvii] It followed that the only avenue open to reason in its untamable desire to know physis was by way of the economic-teleological principle, whereby the natural philosopher, in order to know his object, “must first manufacture it.”^[lviii] Modern rationality, in its techno-capitalist phase, has succeeded in reducing the entire planet to an externality of the human economy: Earth is raw material on one end of the chain of consumption, and on the other, a garbage disposal for toxic waste. In order to avoid the deleterious ecological effects of such an economic system, it is necessary to heal the vegetal repression and sensorial alienation from which it stems.^[lix]

Schelling rejects the anthropocentric Kantian program that justifies treating nature as the raw material awaiting human capitalization. Instead, he inverts transcendental idealism by transforming it into transcendental physics, such that nature is intuited as more than a mere a collection of finished products. Nature is also and primarily a creative productivity that “is as active in geology as in [human] ideation,” as Schellingian philosopher Iain Hamilton Grant puts it.^[lx] It is therefore not only human beings who act to shape a passive nature, since “nature is its own lawgiver.”^[lxi] The human imagination is understood by Schelling to be a potentization of nature’s original creativity.

Whereas Kant argued that “real metaphysics” must be “devoid of all mixture with the sensual,”^[lxii] Marder suggests that the idealist reduction of plant-life to dead linear crystals “[survives] in human thought in the shape of Kantian immutable categories and forms of intuition to which all novel experiences must in one way or another conform.”^[lxiii] Instead of forcing living experience to obey the crystalline categories of thought, Marder’s plant-thinking, like the process-relational imagination, “destroys the Procrustean bed of formal logic and transcendental a priori structures—those ideal standards to which no living being can measure up fully.”^[lxiv]

Vegetal imagination is the esemplastic power^[lxv] through which concepts incarnate in the concrescing occasions of the world, like seeds taking root in the Earth, growing skyward through branch, leaf, flower, and fruit, only to fall again into the soil to be born again, and again . . . Plant-thinking breaks through the crystalline molds of “dead thought”—what Bergson called “the logic of solids”^[lxvi]—to bring forth instead a fluid or plastic logic, a way of thinking-with the creative life of physis, rather than attempting either to flee from or control it.^[lxvii] Whereas in a crystalline logic of solids, thought “has only to follow its natural [intrinsic] movement, after the lightest possible contact with experience, in order to go from discovery to discovery, sure that experience is following behind it and will justify it invariably,”^[lxviii] in a fluid logic of plastics, thought roots itself in the life-process, overflowing the sense-bound understanding’s a prioricategorical antinomies and pre-determined forms of intuition to participate directly in the creativity of cosmogenesis. “A theory of life that is not accompanied by a criticism of knowledge,” according to Bergson,

is obliged to accept, as they stand, the concepts which the understanding puts at its disposal: it can but enclose the facts, willing or not, in preexisting frames which it regards as ultimate.^[lxix]

The plasticity of vegetal imagination, on the other hand, preserves the unprethinkability of a plantlike nature, remaining “faithful to the obscurity of vegetal life” by protecting it from the searing clarity of crystallized rationality.^[lxx] Still, the vegetal imagination grants us a sensitive intimation of the very root of its own image-producing force: as Bachelard suggests, there, “in the heart of matter[,] grows an obscure vegetation,”^[lxxi] just as, in “the life of our hearts,” we are “enable[d] to understand the life of the universe.”^[lxxii]

Schelling is not only one of a handful of philosophers to escape deconstruction by Marder’s vegetal re-invention of metaphysics, he even earns Marder’s praise for defending the continuity between life and thought.^[lxxiii] Schelling suggests that “every plant is a symbol of the intelligence,”^[lxxiv] and that this symbolic intelligence finds expression precisely in the plant’s power of “sensibility,” which—even when the pendulum of organic nature has swung toward its opposite but complimentary pole of “irritability”—remains the “universal cause of life.”^[lxxv]

According to Elaine Miller, another plant-thinker, while Hegel approaches plant-life and physis more generally as appearances to be taken up and sublated by human reason, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie approaches Nature as possessed of its own kind of intelligence:

Schelling does not claim that the human intellect works in the way that a plant grows, but rather that the growth of a plant exhibits the kind of intelligence that nature is. Nature itself is a visible manifestation of the ideal, a manifestation of a power of reason that is not limited to human consciousness.^[lxxvi]

Miller argues that Schelling’s main problem with Hegel’s dialectical understanding of nature stemmed from the latter’s “[reduction of] nature to a passing moment of spirit.” “Human subjectivity,” she continues, “insofar as it believes it can overcome its plantlike fragility, loses sight of its connection to the life-and-death rhythms of nature.”^[lxxvii]

Schelling offers the polar connection between Earth and Sun as an illustration of the life-producing relationship between gravity and light that is responsible for calling forth intelligent plant-life out of the planet.^[lxxviii] Occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner similarly remarks that any attempt to understand the inorganic, mineral dimension of Earth independently of the plant-life it supports will remain hopelessly abstract: “Just as our skeleton first separates itself out of the organism,” says Steiner, “so we have to look at Earth’s rock formations as the great skeleton of the Earth organism.”^[lxxix] Steiner further argues that the cultivation of vegetal imagination will allow the philosopher to come to see “the plant covering of our Earth [as] the sense organ through which Earth spirit and Sun spirit behold each other.”^[lxxx] The mineral and plant realms are to Earth what the skeleton and sensory organs are to the human body. As Plotinus wrote, “Earth is ensouled, as our flesh is, and any generative power possessed by the plant world is of its bestowing.”^[lxxxi] Plant-life has all too often been relegated to the margins of natural philosophy, attended to only to insult it rather than to be inspired by it. And so the natural philosophical imagination has withered and desiccated into a mind/matter dualism. Rejuvenating Naturphilosophie would mean making plant-life the matrix from which all philosophical thinking emerges. Plants are transitional organisms, not quite mineral and not quite mental. They invite the intellect to loosen the seals separating its categories, allowing it to perceive the vegetal life actively mediating every phase of nature’s metamorphosis.

A process philosophy rooted in the power of vegetal imagination requires an inversion of our ordinary experience of the universe. It is as if the world were turned inside out and we found ourselves walking upside down upon the Earth, with our head rooted in the ethereal soil of formative forces streaming in from the cosmos, our limbs yearning for the living ground, and our heart circulating between the two in rhythmic harmony. Rather than stretching for the abstract heights of the intelligible as if to steal a glimpse of heaven, the force of vegetal imagination returns philosophy’s attention to the Earth beneath its feet, and to the roots, branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, and seeds of plants, Earth’s most generous life forms, and indeed the co-generative source (with the Sun) of life itself. Thinking with vegetal imagination is thinking with a plant-soul. Plant-souls, according to Marder, partake of a “kind of primordial generosity that gives itself to all other creatures, animates them with this gift, . . . allows them to surge into being, to be what they are.”^[lxxxii]

Only by finding its vegetal roots can philosophy become planetary, true to the Earth and to the plant-power of imagination. But because the imagination is not a static unity but in fact abyssal/ungrounded, its plant-like growth must be inverted: it has “underground stems” and “aerial roots,” as Deleuze and Guattari put it.^[lxxxiii] Or, as Gaston Bachelard suggests (echoing Plato’s Timaeus), the properly rooted philosopher is like “a tree growing upside down, whose roots, like a delicate foliage, tremble in the subterranean winds while its branches take root firmly in the blue sky.”^[lxxxiv] For Bachelard, the plant is the root image of all life: “The imagination [must take] possession of all the powers of plant life,” he writes. “It lives between earth and sky . . . [it] becomes imperceptibly the cosmological tree, the tree which epitomizes a universe, which makes a universe.”^[lxxxv] For Bachelard, the inverted philosopher’s tree functions to integrate the virtues of growth, depth, uprightness, truth, soil and sky. Simply put, “the imagination is a tree.”^[lxxxvi] Bachelard warns that without the integrative virtues of the tree, the philosopher may become a “sickly soul.” He offers an example by way of a “botanical diagnosis” of Sartre, who in Nausea describes his experience of being frightened by the absurd perception of a chestnut tree’s roots as a meaningless knotty mass of boiled leather: “a root which has lost its tree,” as Bachelard puts it.^[lxxxvii] Bachelard councils us to go beyond the absurdity of the disembodied intellect by reconnecting with the root source of our consciousness in the plantlike imagination.^[lxxxviii]

It is important to reiterate that Marder’s plant-thinking, like Schelling and Whitehead’s process-relational logic of imagination, “rejects the principle of non-contradiction in its content and its form,”^[lxxxix] at least for the purposes of speculative metaphysics.^[xc] It also rejects the corollary law of identity. A plantlike, polar logic of imagination allows concepts to grow together with percepts and identities to become infused with difference. According to Bachelard, “Philosophers, when confronted with outside and inside, think in terms of being and non-being.”^[xci] Indeed, both Schelling and Whitehead affirm Plato’s argument in Sophist that “not-being” is a kind of being.^[xcii] “Every kind,” Plato writes, “has a plurality of Being and an infinity of Not-being.”^[xciii] This is to say that every actuality, every concrete reality, includes within it both what it is and what it is not. Actualities are composed of being and nothing, a polarity which throws them into becoming. Each actual entity, though it at first appears to be merely a finite particular act appearing here and now, encloses within itself a deep history of evolutionary memories and opens out toward an erotic lure of future possibilities. Actual entities are thus nonlocal occasions that are both “here-now” in the present and “there-then” in the past and the future (and each in different ways). “Thus a profound metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry,” Bachelard continues,” which—whether we will or no—confers spatiality upon thought; if a metaphysician could not draw, what would he think?”^[xciv]

On paper, strict adherence to the logical principles of identity and non-contradiction may prevent the mind from making simple errors. But if reality is an ecology of living processes rather than a pile of dead things,—if, as Plato has Timaeus say, cosmogenesis is such that “living creatures keep passing into one another . . . as they undergo transformation”^[xcv]—then adhering to these principles too strictly ends up blinding the mind to the creative advance of nature. Thinking nature otherwise requires reimagining the disincarnate logos driving so much Western philosophy. An incarnate logos attuned to the vegetal imagination not only thinks nature, it becomes nature thinking. “The human who thinks like a plant,” Marder continues, “literally becomes a plant, since the destruction of classical logos annihilates the thing that distinguishes us from other living beings.”^[xcvi] Unlike modern rationality, which is said to be self-grounding, plant-life is open to otherness, dependent on something other than itself (i.e., earth, water, air, and light). In the same way, vegetal imagination receives its power from the elemental life of physis. It is no longer “I” who thinks nature; rather, “it thinks in me.”^[xcvii] As Frederick Beiser wrote of Schelling’s intellectual intuition, through it “I do not see myself acting but all of nature acting through me.”^[xcviii] Thus, in Bachelard’s words, “the [philosophical] tree is everywhere at once.”^[xcix] Or as Schelling himself put it, the philosopher who is vegetally attuned to the rhythms of physis becomes “nature itself philosophizing (autophusis philosophia).”^[c]

Footnotes

^[i] Marder, Michael. Plant-Thinking a Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 21.

^[ii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 126.

^[iii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 75–78.

^[iv] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 127.

^[v] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 35.

^[vi] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 28; both “plant” and “nature” derive from the same Greek prefix (phuo-) and verb (phuein), meaning “to generate,” or “to bring forth.”

^[vii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 28–29.

^[viii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 28.

^[ix] Homer, The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), Book 10, lines 328–42.

^[x] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 30.

^[xi] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 30.

^[xii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 178.

^[xiii] Even earlier than Plato, the Indian Bhagavad Gita used the image of an inverted Ashwattha tree to describe the cosmos. While some Hindu historians suggest the Gita was conceived (if not written down) in the third or fourth millennium BCE, most scholars place its origins around the sixth century BCE (see A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Eds. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957], 99). “The branches of this cosmic tree extend both below and above (below in the material, above in the supraphysical planes)” (See Sri Aurobindo. Bhagavad Gita and Its Message. Ed. Anibaran Roy [Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1995], 15.2).

^[xiv] Plato, Timaeus, 90a–b. In Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1997).

^[xv] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 13.

^[xvi] Marder, Michael. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 16–17.

^[xvii] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 16.

^[xviii] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 18.

^[xix] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 17.

^[xx] Plato, Theaetetus, 149a. In Complete Works. Ed. John M. Cooper (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1997).

^[xxi] Plato, Timaeus, 52d.

^[xxii] Plato, Timaeus, 52e.

^[xxiii] Italics added. Aristotle, De anima, 410b23. Translated by J. A. Smith. 2009. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html

^[xxiv] Aristotle, De anima, 413b1–10.

^[xxv] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 38.

^[xxvi] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 27.

^[xxvii] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 39.

^[xxviii] Plotinus, Enneads 3.8.10, 5–15. In The Six Enneads. Translated by Stephen Mackenna and B. S. Page. 2009. Retrieved from http://classics.mit.edu/Plotinus/enneads.html

^[xxix] Plotinus, Enneads, 3.3.7, 25.

^[xxx] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 44.

^[xxxi] Plotinus, Enneads 3.8.30, 2-3.

^[xxxii] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 47.

^[xxxiii] Plotinus, Enneads 3.8.8, 10-20.

^[xxxiv] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 50.

^[xxxv] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 48.

^[xxxvi] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 49.

^[xxxvii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 58.

^[xxxviii] Marder, The Philosopher’s Plant, 56.

^[xxxix] Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects and Dialogues on Natural Religion. Edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1874), 417.

^[xl] Cleanthes really believes the universe to be a law-abiding machine designed, built, and maintained by a perfect God.

^[xli] Hume, David. Natural Religion, 421.

^[xlii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 120.

^[xliii] Hume, Natural Religion, 416.

^[xliv] Hermes, The Emerald Tablet, line 2. Various Translations. Accessed 1/27/2016. http://www.sacred-texts.com/alc/emerald.htm

^[xlv] Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1929/1978), Part IV.

^[xlvi] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21.

^[xlvii] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 21.

^[xlviii] Fragment 123; translated by Panikkar, Raimon. The Rhythm of Being (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 266.

^[xlix] Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. The Ages of the World. Translated by Jason Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1815/2000), 20–21.

^[l] Schelling, Ages, 21.

^[li] Kant, Immanuel. (1790) 2005. Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard. Mineola (NY: Dover, 1790/2005), 59.

^[lii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 126.

^[liii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 126.

^[liv] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 123.

^[lv] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 128.

^[lvi] Schelling, Werke, 1/7, 18; excerpted and translated by Matthews, Bruce. Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 4.

^[lvii] Kant, Critique of Judgment, Section 75.

^[lviii] Kant, Immanuel. Opus Postumum. Edited and translated by Eckart Förster. Translated by Michael Rosen (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1804/1993), 240.

^[lix] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 22.

^[lx] Grant, Iain Hamilton. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (New York: Continuum, 2008), 53.

^[lxi] Schelling, SW IV, 96 (translation by Grant, After Schelling, 25).

^[lxii] Kant, De mundi sensibilis; Translated by Matthews, Schelling’s Organic Form, 4.

^[lxiii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 163; Hegel also considered plant growth to be linear, like crystals, whereas proper animals are elliptical in their movements (ibid., 119).

^[lxiv] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 164.

^[lxv] A term coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and modeled on Schelling’s own neologism Ineinsbildung (see Biographia Literaria [New York: Leavitt, Lord, and Co., 1834], Ch. 10).

^[lxvi] Bergson, Creative Evolution. Translation by Arthur Mitchell (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), xvii.

^[lxvii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 166.

^[lxviii] Bergson, Creative Evolution, xviii.

^[lxix] Bergson, Creative Evolution, xx.

^[lxx] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 173.

^[lxxi] Bachelard, Gaston. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie. Translated by Colette Gaudin (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, 2005), 11.

^[lxxii] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 36.

^[lxxiii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 157.

^[lxxiv] Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1800/1978), 122.

^[lxxv] Schelling, Philosophy of Nature, 146.

^[lxxvi] Miller, Elaine. The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 124.

^[lxxvii] Miller, The Vegetative Soul, 147.

^[lxxviii] Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1797/1988), 185–86.

^[lxxix] Steiner, The Spirit in the Realm of Plants. Translated by G. F. Karnow. Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1984.

^[lxxx] Steiner, The Spirit in the Realm of Plants.

^[lxxxi] Plotinus, Enneads 4.2.27.

^[lxxxii] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 46.

^[lxxxiii] Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15.

^[lxxxiv] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 85.

^[lxxxv] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 85. The inverted tree is a common motif in hermetic literature.

^[lxxxvi] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 85.

^[lxxxvii] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 85.

^[lxxxviii] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 85-86.

^[lxxxix] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 164.

^[xc] To be clear, Whitehead’s rejection is qualified, as the principle of non-contradiction still applies to analysis of the physical pole of concrescence. The conceptual pole, however, in that it feels a variety of contradictory potentials, is not subject to such a logic (Process and Reality, 348).

^[xci] Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 212.

^[xcii] Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933/1967), 222, 228; Schelling, Ages, 14–15.

^[xciii] Plato, Sophist, 256d–e. Excerpted and translated by Grant, After Schelling, 44.

^[xciv] Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 212.

^[xcv] Plato, Timaeus, 92b–c. Excerpted and translated by Grant, After Schelling, 53.

^[xcvi] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 164.

^[xcvii] Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translated by Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1827/1994), 48.

^[xcviii] Beiser, Frederick. German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 583.

^[xcix] Bachelard, Poetic Imagination, 85.

^[c] Quoted in Grant, After Schelling, 188.

For citation use original publication: “Vegetal Imagination: Schelling and Whitehead as Exemplars of Marder’s Plant Thinking,” in The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality edited by Laura Pustarfi and David Macauley (New York: State University of New York Press, 2024).

"Mind is not an inert being but, on the contrary, absolutely restless being, pure activity, the negating or ideality of every fixed category of the abstractive intellect; not abstractly simple but, in its simplicity, at the same time a distinguishing of itself from itself; not an essence that is already finished and complete before manifestation, keeping itself aloof behind its host of appearances, but an essence which is truly actual only through the specific forms of its necessary self-manifestations; and it is not, as that [dogmatic] psychology supposed, a soul-thing only externally connected with the body, but is inwardly bound to the latter by the unity of the Concept."

-Hegel (Introduction to Philosophy of Spirit, Sec. 378 Zusatz)

Hegel is an absolute idealist. Yet his Science of Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit each in their own way remain in close contact with the determinations, materializations, and imaginations of our embodied lives among one another. Hegel does not begin his inquiry with the Cartesian Ego’s dream of objective nature and from that foundation deduce that human beings have lungs, tongues, nerves, and fingers. His account of subjective and objective Spirit traces the development of the Idea back out of its self-externalization as Nature into the human being—body, soul, and spirit. By recollecting the ways of Nature, including human nature, we are called to remember who we are. Spirit is Nature folding inward, feeling, remembering, imagining, speaking, and finally thinking and knowing and willing a world that might be fit for freedom.

Hegel invokes the Delphic imperative, “Know thyself” (sec. 377). This “‘absolute’ commandment” at the origins of Greek philosophy does not call us to brood over our private eccentricities, nor audit our long list of personal injuries, anxieties, and vanities. Self-knowledge is not always therapeutic. Often it is crucifying. It draws our attention decidedly away from the foibles of the skull-enclosed “single self.” It concerns the human being as such, the universal life of Spirit expressing itself through our finite individuality. Hegel puts the point in properly cosmic terms: “the aim of all genuine science is…that mind shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth. An out-and-out Other simply does not exist for mind.” Hegel claims to have shown that intelligibility runs all the way down, all the way through, and back up again. Spirit seeks itself in Nature because Nature is not an alien garbage dump. Hegel’s Universe is the mirror of Man, and Man the mirror of the Universe.

Hegel is never quite as simple as either his admirers or detractors would prefer. Despite claiming mind can know no Other, in his treatment of our sense of touch or feeling he admits that through it we meet “a self-existent Other.” Through that most intimate of senses, the Absolute System first finds the weight and warmth that comes from friction. Spirit has no absolute outside, no final unintelligible beyond, and yet nor is its freedom found by absorption into a bath of narcissus.

Spirit must meet resistance to become free. Touch, most concrete of the senses, is where Hegel’s idealism touches the earth. Touch reminds us to sit—and even as the four other senses teach us to stand upright, lifting our head high above the clouds to comprehend the world—still touch reminds us that we walk bound by gravity on the ground. The eye flatters the philosopher with luminous surfaces. The ear draws him inward. Smell and taste dissolve him. Touch introduces him to the fact that the Other touches back. If the human mind knows no out-and-out Other, there is at least enough otherness for us to love, and so also enough to bruise and break us.

Knowledge of individual character flaws can, he says, have practical use, especially in “bad political conditions where right and morality have given place to the self-will, whims and caprice of individuals.” But for philosophy, something more universal is required. Hegel’s point is not that individuals do not matter. It is that free and fulfilled individuality comes only through becoming transparent to what is greater than ourselves.

Hegel claims that the Greeks, for all their brilliance, did not attain knowledge of the infinite freedom of Spirit. This came fully to light only with the Incarnation. The Greek mind knew form, measure, the ethical, the beautiful, civic substance. What it did not fully know, according to Hegel, was the infinite inwardness of the subject, the absolute worth of the person as bearer of freedom. That insight became explicit only with the Christ Event and the communal life of the Holy Spirit. One need not follow Hegel’s Christian triumphalism to grasp his philosophical point. Spirit is not fully itself until the Idea at work in Nature is recollected within the infinitely intimate divinity of embodied human life. The task of the Philosophy of Spirit is not only to reveal what it means that human beings think, but why it is that only in our finite thinking can the infinite come to self-knowledge.

Hegel affirms that rational psychology and empirical psychology each degenerate without the other’s aid. Rational psychology sterilizes its subject, reducing the soul to something simple, immaterial, substantial, as though mind might be pinned under glass and labeled. Empirical psychology, by contrast, arbitrarily assembles observations while tacitly assuming a common sense metaphysic. Hegel wants neither abstract faculty psychology nor an assortment of psychometrics. He wants a science of Spirit adequate to the Idea, that is, to Spirit’s actuality.

He praises Aristotle’s De Anima, calling it perhaps the only work of genuine philosophical value on psychology. The task of modern philosophy, according to Hegel, is largely to reinterpret it. Aristotle, unlike moderns, understood that mind and soul are not ghosts in the machine but the form of our living bodies. We should not assume it is easy for our modern minds to understand what Aristotle meant by form. Mind is not inert abstract being. It is “absolutely restless being, pure activity,” not an “already finished essence lurking behind its manifestations,” not “a soul-thing only externally connected with the body,” but something inwardly bound to the body “by the unity of the Concept.” Hegel buries Cartesian dualism and vulgar materialism in the same well-marked grave. Neither understood the limits of their own Understanding.

Hegel begins his work on Subjective Spirit not with clear self-consciousness but with the soul sunk in dreamy feeling, in the “dull stirring” of natural life. Spirit is there, but remains in itself and not yet for itself. It breathes, senses, suffers, slumbers, and begins to rub the sleep from its eyes. Hegel distinguishes two spheres of feeling. In one sphere, affections originate in the bodily senses and are driven inward by recollection. In the other, affections arise in the mind and seek corporeal expression. Anthropology studies the former current, psychology the latter. Hegel’s account of embodiment is thus not a one-way story in which either a transcendental ego projects its categories onto a passive manifold of sensations or an external nature trains a passive brain-machine. The movement of the Concept is always reciprocal. Body and soul are inseparable moments of actual life.

This reciprocity governs Hegel’s treatment of the senses. The five senses are not arbitrary apertures by which mind just happens to collect data from an alien external world. They are rationally necessary articulations of the Concept, each a “circle of single sensations” opening to a distinct modality of Nature. Natural philosophy knows physical and chemical reality only as mediated by our sensory organs. That means physics and chemistry are not complete simply as bloodless mathematical models, only later to be translated into sensations by our accidental animal parts. Rather, light, sound, taste, smell, heat, weight, texture, and shape belong to the way Nature necessarily manifests itself to Spirit. Subjective Spirit is not layered on top of Nature, as if it leaves Nature behind, but Nature’s innermost being appearing to and beginning to comprehend its own universality.

Sight and hearing belong to what Hegel calls “physical ideality.” Sight is linked to light, which he describes as “physicalized space.” Light is the medium of sight. What we see is not light as such but color, light rendered determinate by mixing with the darkness of variously reflective surfaces and turbid media. Here Hegel is in conversation with Goethe, and both with Plato, who was first to note the likeness between eyesight and sunlight. Light not only makes sight possible but makes it necessary. Aristotle’s ranking of sight as the noblest sense remains partly intact. But Hegel still finds it shallow. It gives us only distant surfaces, no depth. The full weight of what lay hidden in the shadows of sight awaits the sense of touch.

Hearing is already more inward. While light is physicalized space, sound is “physicalized time.” Sound is body translated into inner vibration. Hearing enters what sight can only survey. Hegel notes that sound travels not only through air but through any medium, including earth: he reminds us that distant cannon fire can be heard by putting one’s ear to the ground. Perhaps Hegel himself heard Napoleon’s army this way as it marched on Jena. Hearing is the sense through which bodies confess their inward unrest.

Smell and taste express the Concept in its moment of “real difference,” and are chemical in a literal sense. Smell involves volatilization. Taste involves dissolution and direct chemical commerce. Taste requires immediate contact with its object, smell less so, hearing still less, sight none at all. The senses trace a speculative spectrum from intimate consumption to aloof contemplation. Again, this means that chemistry is not properly understood as a set of reaction equations lacking all quality. Acidity, bitterness, sweetness, salinity, alkalinity are not “psychic additions” (to use Whitehead’s term) projected onto what is in reality a tasteless material world. They are modes in which real chemical differences become sensible. A chemistry that has divorced itself from our sense of taste, like a theory of light that ignores the sight of color, has become too abstract, indeed, too idealistic.

Touch, finally, is “the most concrete of all the senses.” It is the moment of “earthly totality.” Here we encounter solid individuality as such: weight, texture, hardness, softness, heat, shape, gravity, mechanics. The fingers caress what the eyes can only speculate. Touch is where the body no longer negates but must negotiate. The higher senses grant a certain theoretical nobility, but touch is bluntly democratic. Touch is where Hegel’s idealism has to stop preening roses and start deadlifting.

From the Anthropology section, Hegel’s account of Subjective Spirit passes to a redux of the Phenomenology, where consciousness proper emerges. An Ego is now aware of an object. Consciousness is thus a correlational circle. An I finds itself standing over against the object it knows. Sense-certainty gives way to Perception, which Hegel identifies with Kant’s critical philosophy and to the usual mindset of the special sciences. With Perception, the mind no longer trusts bare immediacy but organizes the sensory given by means of forms, categories, laws, and inferred forces. As usual Hegel’s criticism of this standpoint is not that it is false but that it is incomplete. It remains trapped in the no man’s land between subject and object. It does not yet know that the categories by which it thinks the object are both its own and the object’s.

Psychology begins once mind has taken itself back from this merely correlational asunderness and grasped itself as the unity of subject and object. Intuition is the first stage of this reunion process. Hegel again parts company with Kant by denying that space and time are merely subjective forms imposed on sensibility. They belong already to things-in-themselves, having been imparted to them by “an implicit, infinite spirit, by the creative eternal Idea.” This may be an astonishing sentence for some readers. It leans heavily on the relation between Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and his doctrine of Subjective Spirit. If Nature is already the Idea in externality, then the forms of our intuition are not simply subjective impositions. They are mind meeting things in the spatiotemporal form that is objectively theirs. This is true even if space and time remain, from the standpoint of free intelligence (and, it would seem, many contemporary quantum theories), meagre and superficial so far as ultimate determinations go.

Only when I reflect that it is I who have spatiotemporal intuitions do I enter the standpoint of representation. Hegel here mentions Aristotle’s claim that philosophy begins in wonder. Wonder arises, according to Hegel, because Reason trusts that, even when it encounters in intuition objects that initially appear irrational and alien, it will with effort of thought find that it can rediscover itself in them. And so we gaze up at the scattered stars, struck by how familiar their strange order is, how close their infinitude. But, Hegel insists, philosophy must rise above wonder. Wonder is a launching pad and not a destination. (This is in contrast to Whitehead, for whom, even when philosophy has done its best, the wonder remains.)

Representation inwardizes intuition. Intelligence now “has” the intuition as its own. Hegel says the word “has” in reference to the mind’s possession of ideas and images marks a general sign of modern inwardness. The modern mind lives in a private treasury. He describes the mind as a “night-like mine or pit” in which infinitely many images are stored up.

Hegel swiftly rejects associationism. Universal ideas do not arise because similar sensations happen to collide in the cellar of consciousness, as if faded impressions could carry the weight of ideas. Intelligence works in the reverse way. The universal actively strips away the accidental. The Idea overpowers the image. Representation thus mediates objective being and subjective universality, and this mediation flowers into imagination. Reproductive imagination retrieves and recombines images. Creative imagination’s “self-sprung ideas” do something more by giving sensuous form to inward universality. In art, Hegel says, the Idea appears in sensuous existence. Imagination is the “internal studio of intelligence,” and when the agent of unification between Thought and Being, is Reason itself.

Hegel then transitions from image and symbol to sign. Symbols still bear some natural affinity to what they mean. Signs do not. The sign, according to Hegel, is “the pyramid into which a foreign soul has been conveyed.” A sensible form becomes a monument for an inward meaning not originally its own.

In speech the inward Idea manifests itself in adequate utterances. Sensation and intuition are given a “second and higher existence” than nature first granted them, as the lips, palate, tongue, and lungs are conscripted from their bodily functions into the service of signification. Hegel’s claim that “we think in names” is a thesis about the alphabetic conditions of determinate thought. He calls the word an “inward externality.” External, because it is sounded or written; inward, because it is the mark of intelligence. Thus language “gives to thoughts their highest and truest existence.”

He calls the alphabet a system of “signs of signs,” since visible letters designate vocal sounds that designate meanings. Hegel thinks this gives alphabetic script an immense educational power. It trains the mind away from sensibly concrete images and toward the formal articulation of concepts in speech. Hegel’s dismissive remarks about Chinese characters and the alleged “stationary” quality of Chinese civilization are regrettable. The latter sensibility especially should be discarded. But the philosophical differences between “hieroglyphic” and “alphabetic” languages remain interesting and important. Our media of inscription are not neutral. Writing systems shape the cognitive relations we form between image, sound, abstraction, and inward freedom. Hegel is right at least that to learn to read and write is not merely to acquire a useful new skill but to be initiated into an otherwise secret society of mind.

Still, Hegel admits, loquaciousness can become a block to thought rather than its lubricant, conveying verbal material without inhabiting its meaning. The word gives thought its truest existence, but only if the word remains animated by the Concept.

Pure thinking is the stage at which subject and object are finally unified in and for themselves. “Underlying all our actions,” Hegel claims, “is the presupposition of the unity of Thought and being.” Action itself would be unintelligible if the world were wholly foreign to Reason. Yet merely being a thinker is not enough. Thinking must come to know itself. It must move beyond the abstract Understanding, which divorces form from content, into Reason, where form and content are one. Only then does intelligence determine itself as will. When intelligence knows itself as determinative of its own content, it becomes will. Thought and will, which ordinary consciousness separates, are in truth internally one. Without thought there can be no free will, only appetite and impulse.

And at this point, having realized its own freedom in pure thinking, Subjective Spirit passes over into Objective Spirit. Willing is thinking stepping into actuality. Freedom is no one’s private property. It must become deed and action, enact institutions, partake in ethical life, politics, art, and religion. The truth of subjectivity is the labor of giving freedom a world that is worthy of it.

Featured speakers include Freya Matthews, Iain McGilchrist, Susan Blackmore, and Philip Goff. I’ll also be speaking.

The conference will feature a dynamic mix of plenary lectures, panel discussions, and community building fostering both depth and dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

If you’re wondering what comes after mechanistic materialism, scientific reductionism, and cultural nihilism, join us to help create what’s next.

Darius’s paper provides an excellent internal critique of Active Inference, showing how it has not—at least not yet—provided a satisfactory solution to the frame problem. In its original classical AI form, the frame problem concerned how to encode the effects of action without having to encode all the irrelevant consequences that follow from that action. The broader issue is the problem of relevance: how agents like us somehow manage to zero in on what matters in perception and action despite the indefinite overabundance of what does not. Why this affordance, this threat, this invitation, this face, this concern, now? Darius’s argument, as I understand it, is that active inference can at best describe the encoding of relevance once relevance realizing behavior is already underway. But it does not explain how relevance is realized in the first place, especially in genuinely novel situations.

The distinction between description and explanation recurred several times. One can always preserve a formalism by making it more elastic. One can say that if only the hierarchy of priors were rich enough, if only the precision-weighting were dynamic enough, if only the generative model were fine-grained enough, then relevance would be accounted for. Darius put pressure on the appeal to hierarchical motivated control, on the question of how highly weighted preferences get weighted in the first place. If every precision weighting requires some higher-order preference structure to authorize it, then one faces an infinite regress. If one halts the regress by positing a “first prior” or ground norm, one pays for that stability by rendering the system too rigid, too overdetermined, too cramped to account for the flexibility and novelty of actual life. So the theory gets caught between regress and rigidity.

Tim asked whether this is really just a problem in one corner of cognitive science, or whether it is a generic problem that appears everywhere once one begins asking about the genesis of order, the origin of norms, the emergence of stable forms from fields of variation. The frame problem is not merely a technical puzzle for AI engineers or Bayesian theorists but a particular way of expressing a much older and broader question about the origins of order and the intelligibility of the world.

Tim kept returning to Darwin. Darwin’s genius was to take variation seriously, to refuse to treat species or forms as primary givens, and instead to ask how relatively stable forms arise from processes that do not begin with fixed types. It is Tim’s Darwinism that leads him to resist any metaphysical move that front-loads the possibility landscape, any appeal to pre-given frames, a priori attractors, transcendent priors, or what Dennett called skyhooks. For him, speculative philosophy, at its best, is the critique of postulation. It should strip back the first principles as far as possible, not to deny the reality of individuals, teloi, meanings, and norms, but to show how their reality depends upon an immanent genealogy rather than a transcendent guarantee.

This is where Tim and I always begin our tango about Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism. Whitehead is in one sense as radical an evolutionist as one could hope for. He historicizes the laws of nature, the very geometry of spacetime, the atomic elements and all forms of enduring organization. And yet he also introduces eternal objects and the primordial nature of God, which for Tim sound like precisely the sort of metaphysical posit that compromises a fully constructivist, ontogenetic account. I am sympathetic to the concern, but I think Whitehead is doing something subtler and more interesting than installing a fixed cosmic prior. The primordial nature of God is not God’s Bayesian belief-state about future outcomes. It is not a probability distribution over a pre-given state space. It is not a hidden optimization function or Maxwellian demon secretly running the universe from above. It is Whitehead’s way of biting the bullet to solve the meta-frame problem. Each actual occasion of experience feels some gradient of relevance, some lure toward forms of novelty appropriate to its concrete situation.

Culturally freighted phrases like “the primordial nature of God” are not the sort of thing most cognitive scientists are trained to take seriously. One of the things I wish we had had more time to discuss in the dialogue is Whitehead’s distinction in Process and Reality between statistical and non-statistical judgment.

The statistical ground is numerical. It depends upon a finite set of cases, upon ratios, frequencies, measurable likelihoods. If one wants to model cognition in Bayesian terms, this is the territory one occupies. There is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Whitehead is not anti-statistics. But he explicitly introduces a non-statistical ground because statistical induction, by itself, cannot explain how organisms navigate genuinely novel situations in which the relevant possibilities are not already laid out in a countable state-space. Here the ordering of possibilities is not statistical but intensive, qualitative. It concerns suitability, relevance, appetition, felt importance, in Whitehead’s terms. It is graduated, but not by ratios. Not everything that comes in degrees is numerical in the extensional sense.

This is where my half serious contrast between error minimization and Eros maximization comes in. I am not proposing a rival optimization theory, as if to swap the statistical with the libidinal. Tim is right to be suspicious of optimization language when it starts pretending to be ontology. My phrase is meant as a polemical device to mark a difference between what can be calculated and what cannot. Error minimization, as formalized in Predictive Processing or Active Inference, operates within a pre-specified, extensional structure of more or less likely states. It is powerful precisely because it works within a mathematizable space. But that very strength is also its limit. Eros maximization, as I’ve been trying to think it, names not another formal objective function but an organism’s lure toward richer aesthetic contrasts, deeper satisfaction, more intense realization of value in situations where the possibility space cannot be pre-stated in advance. It concerns what Whitehead calls “intensive relevance,” not merely likelihood. It is not the inverse of error minimization. It is an attempt to think what extensional models necessarily abstract away.

The Active Inference Framework can model organisms “as if” they are Bayesian calculators minimizing prediction error, and no doubt that as if can be instrumentally fruitful. The trouble begins when the model is ontologized, when the extensional formalism is taken to reveal what life and mind really are. Then the organism, and consciousness, purposiveness, valuation, and meaning along with it, start to look like mere appearances to be explained away by reference to more fundamental cybernetic machinery.

This brings us back to the manifest image/scientific image issue that I raised at the start of our conversation. The scientific image, especially in its computationalist forms, seeks to get behind the world of lived experience and conscious agency, to explain these in terms of sub-personal mechanisms, eg, neurological functions, information processing, thermodynamic constraints, etc. I would hope it was obvious that all of us, including cognitive scientists, begin always and inevitably embedded within the meaning-saturated world disclosed to consciousness, what Husserl called the “life-world.” Computationalist cogsci tends to forget that disclosure. It then builds a formal apparatus it hopes might account for the relevance realizing behavior of beings that lack such worldly embeddedness. It then declares that the formal apparatus is all that is needed to explain it. The frame problem thus exposes the tremendous costs of beginning from a picture of mind as somehow separate from the world, thus needing to construct internal models in order to infer what lies beyond it.

I mention Helmholtz in our dialogue, who takes the Kantian problem of how the mind contributes form to experience and naturalizes it into a theory of unconscious inference. Sensations become signs and cognition becomes the inferential reconstruction of their external causes. Contemporary Predictive Processing and Active Inference frameworks, especially in their more explicitly representational forms, inherit this philosophical move. The organism, somehow severed from its world, must re-establish indirect contact by building a self-world-model. The frame problem thus becomes inevitable. If the mind is first sealed off from the world, then it must carry a vast inner representation or mega-model for deciding which among its possible interpretations is relevant now. But the very need for such a mega-model is a sign that something has gone wrong upstream.

Kant thought the scandal of philosophy was that no proof of the external world had been given. Heidegger later says the real scandal is that one thinks such a proof is needed. Dasein is not first a private interiority needing to infer its way back to the world. We are always already in the world, already thrown into history, immersed in significance, and caught up in networks of concern. This was one reason I was drawn to enactivism as a student. Enactivism resists the temptation to treat cognitive science as the search for sub-personal machinery that will explain personhood away. It begins from embodied world-involvement rather than from inner representation. But as we also discussed, even enactivism can falter if it makes too much of homeostatic self-maintenance (ie, autopoiesis) as the ground norm. Then one still struggles to explain the idiosyncrasy and occasional perversity of actual life.

And actual life, as Tim rightly insisted, is not some miraculous machine for solving the frame problem. Organisms are not unfailing virtuosos of relevance realization. They are thrown into ongoing processes of selection, distraction, error, improvisation. They get eaten because they sometimes miss what matters. They are lured by mimicry and fooled by camouflage. They seize on the wrong thing. They wander. This is not a bug in life but is constitutive of its openness. Whitehead says something like this in his theory of propositions. A proposition is not first of all a true or false sentence. It is a lure for feeling. And he says that it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. That line should be framed above the desk of every cognitive scientist tempted to reduce life to error minimization. The false, the irrelevant, the not-yet-validated, the interestingly wrong, are not merely noise to be filtered out. They are what drives the creative advance.

Darius has exposed a real weakness in Active Inference’s stronger explanatory ambitions. Priors, precision-weighting, and hierarchical policy control all seem to presuppose precisely the relevance they are meant to explain. Tim is right that the frame problem is one local manifestation of a deeper problem of origins. From my Whiteheadian point of view, the reason these optimization models keep running aground (at least as final explanations, if not as useful descriptions) is not merely that they need more technical refinement. It is that they remain trapped within a Cartesian, representationalist image of cognition. Whitehead gives us a way to think beyond that image, not by abandoning science, but by refusing to turn a successful formalism into a final ontology. In this context, Darius mentioned Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor’s wonderful little book, Retrieving Realism (2015), which I reviewed almost a decade ago, including a Whitehead-inspired extension: “Retrieving Realism: A Whiteheadian Wager” (2017).

The frame problem is not just a headache for computationalists. It is a clue that reality is more participatory, relational, value-saturated, and improvised than the dominant modern scientific image has allowed. What is needed is not less metaphysics but better, more explicit metaphysics. Whitehead says that metaphysics is “descriptive generalization.” I take this as part of his effort to remind scientists, and really all theorists, that philosophy is not primarily in the business of offering yet another explanation of things. As Tim was suggesting, philosophy should function as a critic of the abstractions of the special sciences. Its task is avoid allowing the world we actually inhabit to be explained away.

The danger is that certain scientific frameworks, when overextended, begin to explain away important aspects of the prosaic or manifest image. They forget that their own explanatory power depends upon abstractions drawn from experience, and then they start treating those abstractions as though they were the whole of reality. Whitehead’s idea of descriptive generalization is meant to resist this. He wants a metaphysical scheme broad and supple enough to apply across the special sciences, but also across the full range of human life: art, law, ethics, religion or spirituality, and the rest.

Such an approach to metaphysics would help us see when an explanation is genuinely illuminating and when it has become greedy, when it slides into reductive overreach. It keeps us from explaining away realities that the scientific practice itself already presupposes, or from arriving at a view of human life that is ethically and spiritually impoverished. Descriptive generalization thus seems to me a much better way of understanding the aim of metaphysics than explanation. Metaphysics is not trying to outcompete the sciences. It is trying to provide a critical and capacious matrix of general ideas within which their abstractions can be situated, assessed, and kept in proportion.

Already in The Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead was resisting the assumption that nature is a mere aggregate of independent material entities passing through empty space and extensionless instants of time. He instead articulates a view of nature as a network of events in patterned relations, where the patterns express the characteristics of said events, which he calls objects.

“…the character of an event is nothing but the objects which are ingredient in it and the ways in which those objects make their ingression into the event. Thus the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison of events. Events are only comparable because they body forth permanences. We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say, ‘There it is again.’ Objects are the elements in nature which can ‘be again.’” (CN, 143-144)

This account is the seed of the later Philosophy of Organism. The world is not built up out of little self-enclosed lumps first given in isolation and only later externally related. The whole pervades the parts, and the parts only are what they are by virtue of their ingression into a larger processive whole.

In The Concept of Nature Whitehead argues that the classical doctrine of matter made a disastrous mistake: it separated the entity from the factor of sense-awareness, turned the entity into a substratum, and degraded the factor into an attribute. This material substratum was thus forever hidden from our actual perception, with its instances only ever entering into accidental external relations with one another (thus making the idea of “laws of nature” incomprehensible and arbitrary imposed, since the laws have no necessary relations to the things said to be in lawful relationship).

I can understand the resistance some feel when they first encounter Whitehead’s eternal objects and the primordial nature of God. I stubbed my toe on them when I first began studying Whitehead’s process ontology in grad school. One jumps into the Heraclitean river and expects to flow unimpeded, but quickly discovers that rivers have rocks and banks. At first glance, Whitehead’s eternal objects can seem like suspicious survivals, relics of ancient metaphysics awkwardly reinserted into what otherwise presents itself as a radically empirical, process-relational onto-epistemology. If actual occasions are the final real things, if Creativity is ultimate, if the world is composed of relational events rather than substances, then why not stop there? Why not let occasions and their prehensions do all the work?

However, after sitting with the problems Whitehead was trying to resolve, not only in his mature metaphysical scheme but in his earlier philosophy of science, I came to appreciate the function these categories play and no longer find them to be expendable. They are not theological ornaments hanging from an otherwise secular account of the heaven-tree.1 They arise from the criteria of his categoreal scheme itself: the need of coherence, that the fundamental notions of the scheme “presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless”; and the need of adequacy, that every feature of our experience, including of patterned potentiality and the felt indeterminacy of a lure, finds interpretation in the scheme. Whitehead is trying to think becoming without collapsing the universe into sheer indiscriminate flux, to think relationality without sacrificing individuality, and to think novelty without reducing it either to randomness or to the mechanical reshuffling of settled facts. Eternal objects and the primordial nature of God arise from this effort.

This becomes clearer if we start where Whitehead starts in The Concept of Nature. There the ultimate fact for sense-awareness is an event. We cannot hold nature still. Nature comes to us as passage, occurrence, happening. But sense-awareness also discloses factors in nature that are not themselves events. The sky is blue, for example. A particular shade of blue has a definite implication in events, appearing only when conditions are ripe; but it is not itself an event. Nature is evental through and through, but events are not exhausted by their eventhood alone. They ingress and express characteristic patterns. And these characteristics can recur, thus allowing for the comparability of events. Objects are the forms amidst the flux of nature that can “be again.”

Objects are not alien to events. They are not substances standing over against process. Nor are they private ideas projected by minds onto an otherwise colorless flux. They are the repeatable ingredients by which events become comparable, characterizable, and so scientifically and metaphysically intelligible. We should dwell on Whitehead’s term “ingression” (which has recently taken up by as part of his Platonic research program in biology). “The ingression of an object into an event is the way the character of the event shapes itself in virtue of the being of the object” (CN 144). But, he qualifies, “it is equally true to say that objects are what they are because events are what they are. Nature is such that there can be no events and no objects without the ingression of objects into events” (ibid.) This is not a new kind of dualism, but a dipolar reciprocity.

By the time Whitehead later speaks of “eternal objects,” he is not suddenly importing a Platonic colonnade into an otherwise Heraclitean event ontology. He is expanding on a problem already present in his philosophy of science: if events pass, what accounts for the recognizable, repeatable, and comparable factors through which events have determinate form? If there were only passing occasions, with no repeatable patterns of definiteness, then the world would be a featureless wash of perishing singularities with no intelligible recurrence and no basis for distinction much less comparison between events. Scientific knowledge would be impossible for the simple reason that science depends on the recurrence of forms across distinct events. No persistent patterns, no science, and no metaphysics.

…

It is important to note that Whitehead explicitly denies “predetermination” to eternal objects and the primordial nature of God. He carefully distinguishes between the definite and the determinate, with the latter applying only to actualities. Eternal objects and the primordial nature of God are thus “deficient in actuality.” They are not actual entities (God is only an actual entity with the inclusion of the consequent nature). They are not fully determinate facts. They are real, but as forms of definiteness and as orderings of potential relevance, not as finished concrete actualities.

This is why Whitehead says in Process and Reality that the many eternal objects, abstractly conceived merely in their bare isolated multiplicity, lack any existent character. They require transition to a conception of them as “efficaciously existent by reason of God’s conceptual realization of them” (PR, 249). The divine mind is the primordial created fact, the inverted root of the heaven-tree, "the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. By reason of this valuation, eternal objects acquire definite relevance for the concrescence of actual occasions. “Apart from God, eternal objects unrealized in the actual world would be relatively non-existent for the concrescence in question.”

But God’s conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the guise of a barren, eternal hypothesis. It is God’s conceptual realization per­forming an efficacious rôle in multiple unifications of the universe, which are free creations of actualities arising out of decided situations. Again this discordant multiplicity of actual things, requiring each other and ne­glecting each other, utilizing and discarding, perishing and yet claiming life as obstinate matter of fact, requires an enlargement of the understanding to the comprehension of another phase in the nature of things. In this later phase, the many actualities are one actuality, and the one actuality is many actualities. Each actuality has its present life and its immediate pas­sage into novelty; but its passage is not its death. This final phase of pas­sage in God’s [consequent] nature is ever enlarging itself. In it the complete adjustment of the immediacy of joy and suffering reaches the final end of creation. This end is existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of self-existence. The function of being a means is not disjoined from the func­tion of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world.” (PR, 349-350).

Whitehead’s God is not a supernatural intruder interrupting an otherwise self-sufficient world of processes. God names the actualizability of ordered possibility, the infinite envisagement whereby pure potentials become relevant lures for concrete becoming. This is also why Whitehead insists that everything must be somewhere, and that the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere as well. That “somewhere” is “the non-temporal actual entity,” that is, the primordial nature of God. Otherwise relevant novelty would have to float into the actual world out of nothing. If one admits as yet unrealized potentiality as really relevant to actual becoming (which to my mind is what is meant by the unprestatability of evolution), then one must ground the source of that relevance ontologically and not merely verbally. Whitehead’s answer is not ad hoc. It follows from his ontological principle: no actuality, no agency; no actual entity, no reason.

If we try to delete eternal objects and make do only with actual occasions and their physical prehensions of one another, Whitehead’s scheme no longer makes any sense, so best to chuck the whole thing and start fresh. In his scheme, without eternal objects and the primordial nature of God, there can be no relevant novelty, no individuality, no scientific knowledge, and certainly no metaphysics. This is not because Whitehead arbitrarily says so, but because his whole account of concrescence rests on the coherence of its dipolarity. Becoming is qualified both by the settled determinateness of the actual world and by conceptual prehensions of the indeterminateness of eternal objects. Novel process is constituted by the ingression of eternal objects not yet exemplified in the settled facts of the past.

Novelty is not mean mere randomness. Novelty means the emergence of a fresh interpretation that is nonetheless relevant to a concrete situation. For that, there must be more than the settled past. There must also be unrealized but relevant possibilities. Whitehead even says flatly that apart from real potentiality, there can be no nexus of actual entities being superseded by novel actual entities. The alternative is a static monistic universe, lacking unrealized potentialities. Everything is already actualized. Eternal objects are therefore not the enemies of process. They are one of the conditions allowing process to be genuinely creative rather than merely repetitive or chaotic.

An actual occasion is not just a passive bundle of inherited influences, fully reducible to its past relations. Its concrescence involves selection, valuation, exclusion, emphasis. In Whitehead’s mature scheme, the “subjective aim” is the means by which an occasion becomes this occasion and not another. But the subjective aim is not spun out of nothing. It feels the originating divine concrescence’s unity of conceptual feelings, including among their data all eternal objects. The finite occasion thus feels the universe of definite potentials as relevant lures appropriately realizable under its unique conditions. The divine valuation or “initial aim” does not predetermine the outcome of a finite concrescence. It offers persuasive alternatives, not coercive ultimatums. It offers the possibility of individual self-determination, not the cancellation of freedom.

In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead’s whole theory of objects is designed to explain how events can be compared, and why nature is not an accidental aggregate but an ordered system, a cosmos. Rather than being arbitrarily imposed from outside, the so-called laws of nature must be understood as the outcome of the characters of the entities which are found in nature. They are thus emergent habits, a function of the reciprocal relation between entitative processes and the regularities they canalize and are canalized by in turn. Whitehead’s point in insisting on an ontology of both events and objects follows from his sense that scientific intelligibility presupposes repeatable forms of definiteness. Without something like eternal objects, something that recurs amidst occurrences, law-like regularity would be impossible. Something might still be happening, but its order would no longer be thinkable, much less knowable.

And certainly there can be no metaphysics without some account of potentiality irreducible to past and present actuality. Process and Reality is explicit that there are no “self-sustained facts, floating in nonentity.” Every proposition about a fact presupposes a wider systematic universe that gives the fact its determinate status. Particular actualities cannot be understood in abstraction from the universal context out of which they arise.

So far as I can tell, those who imagine they might make do with only determinate actualities and no definite potentials only end up sneaking the latter in under some other label. They may speak of structures, affordances, dispositions, constraints, attractors, probabilities, virtualities, or morphospaces. Fine. In many specialized disciplines those terms may even be preferable. But such terms always seem to me to be doing some version of the metaphysical work Whitehead assigns to eternal objects. Eliminating eternal objects is like trying to break a magnet in half to remove the negative pole. You just end up with a smaller magnet.

That is why the appeal to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness cuts both ways. Whitehead’s point is not that we should speak only of actual occasions of experience and banish all abstract categories. His point is that we must never mistake abstractions for the full concreteness of actual life, or imagine that concrete experience might be explained solely by reference to abstract universals.

“The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete par­ticular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way.’ The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?” (PR, 20).

Concrete fact requires both passage and pattern, both actualization and possibilization, both inheritance from the past and lure toward the not-yet. To reduce the real to determinate occasions alone is every bit as abstract as reducing it to inert substances.